The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  The Fräulein listens dreamily. It is soothing just to sit while Clara reads. It demands nothing of her but that she receive. For a while she pays no heed to what Clara is reading. It is Clara’s voice, snagged and husky, her slow rendering of the words – she is not accustomed to reading aloud – that holds the Fräulein’s wayward attention. It is like the application of balm, the sweet stroke of a cool hand on burning skin, or the steady supplication of familiar prayer, the gentle cadence of a voice which, for once, asks no questions. But after several days of Clara’s recitations, she starts to listen to the stories. Where, they speculate, is the lost Russian princess? One story has it that Anastasia was spirited away from the slaughter by White Army officers disguised as Bolshevik guards. Another that only the tsar was shot while the rest of the family was moved in a covered train, and Anastasia, dressed as a peasant girl, had escaped. No, no, she is in hiding in a convent in Zagorsk, or living under an assumed name in the Crimea … There are, the Fräulein thinks, as many questions about this poor girl as there are about me.

  ‘Just imagine,’ Clara murmurs wistfully, ‘somewhere out there, a lost princess too terrified to speak.’

  SHE WOULD NEVER understand why she had given in to Clara. Why her, when she had resisted the veiled threats and blandishments of everybody else? It was a surrender, she knew, after a battle of wills. Her own silence had managed to frighten or deflect. Hilda, Minna and the others had butted at it like enraged bulls, Nurse Malinovsky had toyed with it circumspectly, but Clara had matched it with a silence of her own – stifled, testy, combative. The truth was she was lonely. The monastic-like retreat she had shared with Clara had made her yearn for its obverse – the inconsequential gaiety of female companionship. As if that was something she had known and lost. And though it had been Clara who had pursued her, she felt as if her time at Dalldorf had been a kind of attenuated waiting, filled with a fearful certainty that someone would eventually appear and undo her. It had not occurred to her that it would be someone from within Dalldorf’s walls and that her undoing, if that was what it was, would be so seductive.

  If their friendship had been born in silence, it blossomed into a garrulous and sisterly hubbub. Gagged for weeks, Clara could not stop from talking. Out they poured, her stories of triumph and revenge, punctuated by rounds of laughter. She had a peculiar laugh, like a performance – she would throw her head back and shake her mane of hair as if she were about to sing, but the sound that emerged was not hearty but mirthless, as if she could only approximate gaiety.

  Her life on Schumannstraβe was a catalogue of comedy and grievance. She took in washing; it was the only thing she could do since the palsy had set in. Before, she pointed out lest anyone try to gainsay it, she’d been a supervisor in a laundry, with ten girls under her. It was a step down taking washing in at home, but at least she could work at her own pace. Before her latest bout in Dalldorf she had been saving for a trip – she had a sister in Heidelberg whom she had not seen since before the war. She had made the mistake of telling Helmut Schrader, her next-door neighbour, a no-good scoundrel, that she kept her cash in a biscuit tin beneath the floorboards. She did not trust the banks, she’d lost a fortune in enforced savings during the war. It was Helmut who had whipped the money, she was sure. He’d been in her apartment the night before the money disappeared. They sometimes had a drink or two of an evening, she and Helmut. They were old friends, she explained, if you know what I mean. Oh, they’d had some gay times. He had been a railway guard and sometimes – before the war – he had taken her on trips, smuggling her aboard the night trains and hiding her in the little caboose at the end of the carriage. Had they travelled! Danzig, the Baltic coast. He was out of work now and living on a supplement. He’d lost a leg – no, not in the war, though he liked to let people assume that – when he’d fallen in the depot in a drunken stupor and a decoupled carriage had rolled over him. He just stopped being fun then, Clara said mournfully, came over high and mighty, wanted to be faithful to that milksop of a wife of his. Anyway, she said, what a pair we would have made, him with a false leg, and me with this – she raised her dead arm. She screeched with laughter. When the money disappeared she had waited for him on the stairwell and let fly, screaming accusations so everyone could hear the type he was, and landing several well-aimed punches.

  ‘I gave him a black eye,’ Clara said proudly, as if it were a badge of love, ‘a real shiner!’

  The Fraülein listened to Clara’s stories with a fond alarm. She liked the sense of being included, a witness to Clara’s crowded and haphazard history, but she was aware of the imbalance. Soon Clara would turn to her for confidences and she would have nothing to say. It seemed a bitter twist that she had spent a year and a half being tormented to produce some proof of who she was, to explain away her wounds, to account for herself. Now that their questions had eased off, she was troubled by the consequences of their lack of interest. If they never found out who she was, would she spend the rest of her life here in Dalldorf, the unknown woman whom nobody had wanted? She had a title, nothing more. Fräulein Unbekannt. What she needed was a story. Something to offer Clara. But her mind, dulled by months of idleness, could summon up nothing. She could not even tell the time. Big hand for the minutes, little hand for the hours, she would repeat to herself, but faced with the implacability of a clock face the figures danced and threatened. Awakening from sleep, or roused from hours of withdrawn wakefulness on the ward, she could not tell if it was nine o’clock or a quarter to twelve. Was it nearly lunchtime, or was this the sunken twilight? Darkness seemed to stall, while mornings gobbled hours greedily. Her throat was thick with disuse, language like a wound, festering within. Yet Nurse Malinovsky had told her that she spoke out in her sleep, in tongues. Like Russian, Thea said. But in her waking hours she was a blank, a product of fire, which had left its mark upon her, and water, from which she had been saved. As if that had been the moment of her birth. Ordeal of water, baptism of fire.

  Time quickened while she was with Clara. The deadening tedium of days on Ward B, the dangers and alarms of its nights, gave way to an exhilarating sensation of imminence. Each morning when she awoke she felt she was on the brink of a great discovery. Her sleep was less troubled, and if she woke in the small hours of the morning, she did not need to turn to Nurse Malinovsky. It was enough to know that Clara was there, even if she were snoring loudly at the other end of the ward. She had only known her two months and yet Clara’s presence seemed as comforting as that of a cherished sister. Where others found Clara coarse and loud, she saw a woman wronged. She saw how Clara’s appetite for life was mistaken for vulgarity, her passion dismissed as unseemly appetite. Could they not see, as she could, Clara’s nobility, her sense of decorum? Why, for all the weeks they had known one another, Clara had never subjected her to the kind of crude questioning with which the doctors, nurses and inmates of Dalldorf had badgered her. Was that not proof of finer feeling, that she had never made a single demand? She felt both humbled and aggrandised by Clara’s company. She had been chosen, singled out.

  Clara was in the grip of a furious love. The Fräulein took up her every waking moment. Clara wished she had a name, other than that cold title she had inherited. Fräulein Unbekannt. She invented pet names for her – Princess, Sunny, Baby – but was too shy to employ them. No one had ever taken such heed of her. The Fräulein listened to Clara’s yarns with a rigorous intensity. She seemed to concentrate on every word, her acuity never wavering. It was the kind of rapt attention Clara had always craved. As a girl she had been plain and gangly, the eldest lumbered with the disappointment of not being a son and eclipsed by the brothers who duly followed. Her education had been spotty, her brightness marred by her extravagant temper and, even as a child, her propensity for violence. She had broken a boy’s arm in the schoolyard because he had looked at her oddly. Apart from this one youthful occasion, men did not fall at her feet. For affection, Clara had always had to plot and scheme. Her dramatic looks – the nest
of hair, the startled eyes – did not fall within the ambit of conventional beauty. Her mood swings were too alarming. And then, in her mid-thirties, the seizures struck, leaving in their wake a fluctuating deadness down the right side of her body. The palsy had put paid to her ambitions for love.

  Now in middle age she found herself at last, and totally unexpectedly, the object of intense interest and an almost devotional vigilance. Oh, she rattled on, but only because the Fräulein seemed to like it so. Clara made her laugh – out loud. No one at Dalldorf could recall having heard the Fräulein laugh. As time went on, she indulged in her own mild speculation about the Fräulein; it was the only way she could smuggle through the appalling tenderness that afflicted her.

  ‘Now you, dear Fräulein,’ (Princess! Sunny! Baby!), ‘you are someone grand, I can tell!’ she says one morning in the ward.

  The Fräulein is sitting on a chair and Clara is brushing her hair. The poor diet in the asylum has left it dull and lifeless. Clara, energetically brushing it with her good hand, is determined to make it shine again. And it allows her the illicit luxury of touch.

  ‘How?’ the Fräulein asks eagerly.

  ‘Oh, by your manners, the way you sit, my dear, the way you comport yourself,’ Clara says. ‘I may be only a working woman but I know breeding when I see it.’

  Clara glances at her covertly. The Fräulein is blushing; Clara can see the quick flare of her thrilled embarrassment.

  ‘I have worked for grand people in my time. I was a governess once, in Moscow, before the revolution. When I was a young woman,’ she says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Clara says sadly, ‘I was a young woman once.’

  ‘Oh Clara, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘They were quite the thing, I can tell you,’ Clara says. ‘They had royal blood in their veins. My family …’

  Clara stops, lost momentarily in a trance of remembering. Idly she presses a shank of the Fräulein’s hair to her lips. Then she resumes her brushing, the air crackling with static electricity.

  ‘I call them my family because they were in a way,’ she says. ‘Madame was sickly, spent a lot of time in her room. Not robust, don’t you know. I practically raised those children. I was nursemaid and mother both.’

  Clara had seen the royal family once at a parade to celebrate the tsar’s birthday.

  ‘It was 18 May. Those poor girls passed me on the street. They were as close as you are to me. Why, I could have reached out and touched one of them. And Madame was at a ball in honour of the Grand Duchess Olga in Petersburg. Madame told me all about it. The dresses those girls had, you should have seen them! Once, I copied one for Madame. She had seen Tatiana wear it. She described it to me – organza it was, with netting and pearl details on the bodice and a full skirt that took yards of fabric. Of course, it did not look so well on Madame. She was not so young and after two children …’ Clara sighs. ‘Your body is never quite the same again.’ She lays the brush aside and gathering up the soft bulk of the Fräulein’s hair she begins to coil it into a loose bun at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Oh look,’ she cries delightedly, ‘there’s a little twig caught here. You must have picked it up in the garden. What have you been doing, my little princess, rolling in the hay?’

  Something stirs. The thin ice over her heart splinters. A tiny eggshell sound. And she is suddenly in a new element where all is fluid and clear. A sensation, ancient and trembling, steals over her, like the caress of sun on a shorn meadow, or the blue certainty of a summer sky. The laying of hands on her crown, the sharp intake of love. A full, fat memory comes unbidden, lucid as a teardrop. She is a little girl in her Papa’s arms. He has picked her up from where she has fallen. He envelops her in a blue and gold embrace …

  ‘Fräulein?’ Clara starts.

  Mortified, she lets the Fräulein’s hair fall into a fan across her shoulders. She does not know how the endearment sprang from her lips, but now it hangs between them like some petty, scented secret, revealed. She makes to apologise, but the Fräulein does not seem to register. When Clara leans over the girl she sees a stricken look on her face and a single tear glistening on her cheek. Clara cannot read her expression. Is it passion or grief?

  It had been like a rift, that sudden opening up. A benediction from the past she could not summon up. She did not need to search any more, to pick through her water-logged and blood-soaked dreams for clues. She did not need to offer explanations or even seek them. In that flowering moment, it had been revealed to her. Whoever she was, she had been beloved.

  ON A COLD January day the Fräulein walked alone to the shower block. It was mid-morning. Frost clung to the frozen earth, petrified icicles hung from the eaves. Clara had been called to the director’s office on some business. She did not want to go to the library alone. She turned on the shower and stepped into its effusive rush. The brass shower head was like the tarnished face of a sunflower dispensing rain. She smiled up at it as the water gushed and hissed around her. The cold outside, the warmth within, made her light-hearted and she sang as she soaped herself – an aimless melody, the words of which she had long ago lost. For the first time in Dalldorf, she actually felt … happy.

  Clara, released from the director’s office, had hurried first to the library, expecting to find the Fräulein sitting, as usual, in her glassy perch by the window. She stood nostalgically in the deserted room testing out the wan sensation of absence. She flicked through the old newspapers from which she had been reading aloud to the Fräulein and chose one. She folded it carefully and slipped it into her shift pocket. Then she made her way back to Ward B. There was no sign of the Fräulein there either, so she placed the copy of the Berliner Illustrierte underneath the Fräulein’s pillow and then went in search of her. She found her in the showers. Or rather she heard her first, her small cracked voice echoing damply in the tiled fog of the shower stall. She stood by the doorway and listened. After a few minutes, the fractured singing came to a halt. The Fräulein stepped out, unwary, into the passageway and reached for a towel that hung just out of reach on the rail. Clara stood and watched as she stood, her back turned, blindly fishing for the towel. Her illicit nakedness thrilled Clara, the flawed, misshapen feet, the moulded calves, the fleshy, embarrassed-looking thighs, the dimpled bafflement of cheeks. And then the Fräulein turned around.

  Clara had heard Hilda and the others talk about the Fräulein’s scars but nothing could have prepared her for her first sight of them, a careless patchwork of puckered seams from breast to pubic hair. My poor baby, Clara thought, what is to become of you?

  As if she had heard her unspoken plea, the Fräulein looked up. Her first instinct was to cover herself up, but something about Clara’s piteous expression stopped her. She wanted Clara to see her as she was, a nobody, naked, ruined. Clara saw a princess with bayonet wounds.

  ‘What is it, Clara?’ she asked.

  ‘I am to be released next week,’ Clara said.

  It was the news she had been dreading.

  ‘We could run away,’ she said as Clara wrapped a towel around her and rubbed her dry.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ Clara sighed, emboldened by the prospect of her departure.

  ‘Don’t leave me, Clara,’ she begged. The steaming fog in the bathroom was retreating. She began to shiver.

  ‘Come on,’ Clara said briskly, to hide the tugging at her heart. Like every inmate in Dalldorf she wanted to get out. Who in their right minds would want to stay? ‘Let’s get your clothes on or you’ll catch your death. We’ll think of something. We’ll get you out of here.’

  That night Nurse Malinovsky tried to calm her. She had never seen the Fräulein so distressed. Spates of tears alternated with her old doom-laden silences. It had something to do with Clara, that was all Thea could divine. The nurse had watched the growing friendship between the Fräulein and Clara with alarm. Knowing Clara Peuthert of old, Nurse Malinovsky feared for her new-found companion. The pendulum swing of Clara’s affecti
on was the reason she was in Dalldorf in the first place; love turned to embittered violence in the blinking of an eye. At first she thought that such unlikely bedfellows would quickly fall out. Affection among the mad was rarely constant, she had noticed; their interior dramas were too insistent. Alliances were formed but they rarely withstood the competition of hysterics, tantrums, seizures, the true soul-mates of the insane. Anyway, fraternising could not be outlawed simply because she disapproved, and she had to admit that since Clara Peuthert had landed back in Ward B, the Fräulein seemed less suffering – yes, that would be the word that Nurse Malinovsky would use to describe her – suffering. She had even heard her laugh once or twice, as she and Clara walked in the garden or engaged in forensic perusal of the newspapers in the library.

  That night, as the nurse turned back the covers and guided the still sobbing Fräulein into bed, she heard a rustle underneath the pillow. She slid her hand in and withdrew a crumpled edition of the Berliner Illustrierte, months old.

  ‘And what have we here?’ she mused.

  The Fräulein looked at her blankly.

  Clara Peuthert sidled over to the bed.

  ‘I thought I told you, Peuthert, to go to bed,’ Nurse Malinovsky said. ‘Haven’t you caused enough upset for one day?’

  Clara ignored her.

  ‘I brought it from the library. I thought you might like to have it,’ she said to the Fräulein.

  ‘Pilfering from the library now, Peuthert, is it?’ the nurse said.

  ‘I think you’ll find it gives the Fräulein comfort,’ Clara said smugly.