The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  And, strangely, Clara was right. Propped up in bed, the Fräulein leafed through the pages of the newspaper, even after lights out when she had only the dim illumination from the corridor to read by. And Nurse Malinovsky noticed that, hours later, before she settled down to sleep, she carefully folded the paper and placed it under her pillow as if it were a solemn relic. Some time later, doing her four a.m. round, Thea Malinovsky halted, lamp in hand, by the Fräulein’s bed, relieved to find her sleeping deeply.

  ‘Sweet dreams, Fräulein,’ she murmured softly.

  I dream of sisters. The tangled limbs, the downy skin, the plaited ropes of hair, a shared bed. I hear their laughter floating in the thin blue air across sun-dappled grass. I am the youngest of them, impish and quick, the cleverest. A treasured child, princess darling of her Papa. And then Baby comes. A charmed child whom Papa has wished for so long, he wishes him into life. Papa has such power! We girls creep into the nursery; he lies in his crib, an angel in a white robe. Papa lifts him up and kisses him on the forehead. Our brother, our own little tsarevich. How blessed we are! We do not know how blessed. Those years of joy, the little pleasures. All shrunk and shrivelled like an apple left to ripen in the dark and forgotten. All pucker and decay. Our small world, perfect as a decorated egg, a shiny trinket, blue and gold, smashed into a hundred pieces.

  For days she stays in bed. Clara tries to engage her in conversation, her old bright chatter, her raucous jokes, but the Fräulein cannot bear to enjoy what she is soon about to lose. She turns away and buries her head in the pillow. She pores over the grainy plate on the cover of the Berliner Illustrierte, which Clara has left for her like a love token. She is sure there is a message in it for her. Four girls turn their gaze on her. And there is a little boy in a sailor suit, his lips parted as if he is about to speak. She likes to say their names aloud, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and the baby, Alexei. Apple of their eye. Even in the photograph the girls cluster round him protectively, as if the sudden flash might alarm him.

  The one who has escaped, the one they call Anastasia, is second from the left. She is the only one not smiling. Her hair falls down around her shoulders. Where the light catches it, high on her temple, it seems to turn to gold. The shadows of her sisters cast her face into half-shade, a pocket of it beneath her solemn eye, her left cheek and the dimpled point of her chin fall into darkness. A cuff of broderie anglaise rubs against a glimpse of arm.

  The Fräulein runs her fingers round this face like a blind woman seeking knowledge through her hands. The candid childish gaze, fraught with premonition, is like an entry point, a way in. She examines it through a borrowed magnifying glass. The face enlarged and saucery as she tilts the glass. She trains the glass so close the features fall away into a speckled web and weave, as ink bleeds into paper. She is drawn into the blurry polka-dot engravure, the black pinholes of another world. As if she has turned inside out, the photograph a mirror and she is looking out, not in.

  ‘Fräulein!’

  She jumps. Nurse Walz bends over her.

  ‘I know all these,’ she says.

  Nurse Walz looks at her, puzzled.

  ‘One of them was rescued, they say,’ Nurse Walz says, and, sliding the paper from the patient’s hands, points to Tatiana. ‘This one, I think.’

  The Fräulein shakes her head.

  ‘Which one, then?’ Nurse Walz demands.

  But she cannot shake off the odd feeling that has come over her. As if her very edges are melting, she cannot tell where she begins and ends. She is terrified and exhilarated all at once. Or else, after two years in the madhouse, she has finally lost her mind.

  She toys with the girl’s name. Anastasia. An-a-stas-iah. It ripples like a stream of over rocks. The first syllables twinned and echoed in the second. The name blossoms like a rose, petals crushed and enfolded. She shortens it – Ana – to make it fit the smallness of the princess who owns it. She compares it to her own. Unbekannt. The choppy indifference of it. A name for a logbook, a register. A name that allows no knowing, which lifts a bureaucratic hand and says – keep out, go back, dead end. She studies Anastasia, the little owner of the name – the dreamy tilt of head, the rounded jut of shoulder, the tiny pearls that nestle at her throat. Those eyes, the gravity of the rosebud mouth ripening for disappointment. Little girl, poor lost girl, lost princess. She returns to the photograph, but she finds the little girl is strangely absent. No longer imprisoned in the frenzied puzzle of dots, the grey and black patina of the photographer’s flash. She has escaped!

  Fräulein Unbekannt feels pregnant. Nauseous in the morning, sick with a delicious dread. Her belly flutters, the old wounds ache. A dream is growing there, a curled-up, day-old fledgling. Unfurling, hour by hour, the tiny thorns that will lengthen into fingers, the luminescent skull which will become a polished globe, the pink-raw flesh that will emerge as cherished skin, soft and feathery. A princess incubating. And no one notices that Fräulein Unbekannt is drowning, sinking fast beneath the waters of the Landwehr Canal. Not even Clara. Clara is too busy. There are papers to be initialled. Her brother who has signed her in must sign again to effect her release. Because Caspar Ruecker (Clara’s maiden name; she does not like to dwell on her early unsuccessful marriage to Otto Peuthert, a fancy goods salesman, though she keeps his name) has been through the routine so often, he is lazy about details.

  What matter if mad Clara has to stay an extra week in the loony bin? The journey out to Dalldorf is an imposition, and only possible on Monday afternoons when the ice rink, of which he is the manager, is closed. Ice-house, madhouse, he sometimes thinks, there’s not much difference. Clara limps restlessly up and down the ward. She worries about Caspar not showing up. She frets about the apartment on Schumannstraβe and the state it may be in. She remembers now the upturned table, the chairs flung aside, fruit of her struggle with the orderlies from Dalldorf amidst a snowstorm of featherdown. (She had ripped open the mattress with her bare hands in a frenzied search for her cash box.) But mostly she pines for the Fräulein, who has been sickly and totally withdrawn for days. Nurse Walz says she is as bad as when she was first admitted. She will not talk to Clara, or even meet her gaze. Clara is awed by the magnificence of the girl’s bereavement. She does not know what to do. She fears that she has lost her Fräulein Unbekannt.

  Nurse Malinovsky is sitting at her desk, drifting in the crystalline trance induced by the inky hours before dawn. The only one awake in a sleeping world, alert to the possibility of alarm, but soothed by the rise and fall of slumber all around her, she is thinking of her wedding dress, dreamily calculating how many yards of fabric she will need, when a shadow falls over her. Startled, she looks up. It is Fräulein Unbekannt, who has crept up soundlessly, pale and silent as a ghost.

  ‘What have you there, Fräulein?’ Nurse Malinovsky asks, still half-lost in nuptial reverie. ‘A love letter?’

  The Fräulein hands her the Berliner Illustrierte.

  The paper, Thea notices, is cracked along the edges where it has been folded and refolded, then smoothed by careful hands. So this is what the girl has been mooning over, a photograph of the Russian royals. The picture has a pressed look, like a flower trapped between the pages of a missal.

  ‘It’s a sad story, isn’t it?’ the Fräulein says.

  ‘Yes, Fräulein, it is.’

  Nurse Malinovsky does not dwell on death, not when she is quickened by the future. A silence falls between them.

  ‘Does anything strike you about the photograph?’ the Fräulein asks.

  Nurse Malinovsky studies the picture closely, her eye moving swiftly over the portrait.

  ‘No,’ she says slowly, doubtfully.

  ‘Then you don’t see any resemblance between the two of us?’ The Fräulein points to the face of the youngest grand duchess.

  Nurse Malinovsky looks again, then back at the insistent Fräulein Unbekannt.

  ‘Well,’ she says, gauging the Fräulein’s pallid brow, the eager agitation of her grey e
yes. ‘It’s true there is a similarity.’

  The Fräulein smiles darkly, gap-toothed.

  ‘What are you trying to say, Fräulein?’ It is Nurse Malinovsky’s turn to be agitated. ‘What is it? Is it you, is that what you mean?’

  Rising, she grasps the Fräulein by the shoulders and gently shakes her.

  ‘Is it you, Fräulein, is it?’

  Is it you? Is it you? Who are you? Where are you? Who did this to you? You, you. Who are you? The words swirled in her head, every question she had ever been asked, all rising together and rushing out of Nurse Malinovsky’s mouth. It made her dizzy, as if the world had keeled over and everything had come adrift from its name. The room was spinning. She felt a kind of sea-sickness, as if she were on the brink of a vertiginous fall.

  ‘Fräulein?’

  The name, her name, brought her back from the edge.

  ‘Fräulein, are you all right?’

  The ward, the rows of iron cots, the mothy glow of Nurse Malinovsky’s night light reassert themselves. In the moment when she closed her eyes, they had slid noiselessly back into their place. The nurse’s face fills up her horizon as they stand, clasped together.

  ‘Are you faint?’

  Yes, oh yes, she was faint. So faint she could not be seen. The little princess had fled, unable to bear the cruel gaze of the world.

  ‘Let’s get you back to bed,’ Nurse Malinovsky said, guiding her back to the ward. ‘Try to get some sleep.’

  Thea Malinovsky, shaken by the encounter, travels through the frosty early morning streets. The tram rings merrily as she alights from the back platform and hurries to the Café Luna to meet Dr Leon Chemnitz for breakfast. Their lives are like this, brief untimely encounters – she bug-eyed from night duty, he sticky still from sleep – meeting for just-baked rolls and steaming coffee before she falls into bed and he goes off to start his day at the Westend Hospital. He is in the café before her. He stands and waves to her. They kiss. Urgent day greets languid night.

  Coffee comes. Leon gulps his down, one eye on the clock over the counter.

  Thea barely touches hers.

  ‘What is it, sweetheart?’ he asks, nuzzling at her neck.

  ‘The strangest thing has happened,’ she says, easing away from him and staring abstractly into a veiled distance. ‘You know our Fräulein Unbekannt?’

  Leon nods. He knows them all; the sad, the bad, the mad populate his early mornings.

  ‘She tried to tell me something last night, something about her past.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Leon, she as good as said she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, the daughter of the tsar.’ She feels her eyes well up with tears.

  ‘Oh, Thea, is that all?’ Leon laughs indulgently.

  Thea looks at him, offended.

  ‘Well,’ he says guardedly, trying to dispel the mood of recrimination, ‘it is a lunatic asylum, Thea. What else would you expect?’

  ‘But,’ she protests.

  ‘But what?’ He is impatient with her air of preoccupation.

  ‘The Fräulein is different. She’s never made any claims for herself, that’s what makes me wonder.’

  ‘Wonder?’

  ‘If she isn’t telling the truth.’

  ‘Come here,’ he says, pulling her to him. This time she doesn’t resist. Her hair tickles his chin.

  ‘Even if she is, darling, what can you do about it?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ Thea says. ‘If I report this to Dr Hanisch, or the director, they will seize on it. It will convince them that their diagnosis is right, that she is crazy, and you know I have never believed that. But then if she really is, you know, who she says she is, then she shouldn’t be with us. In Dalldorf, of all places!’

  ‘Thea,’ he says, ‘Thea.’ He loves her name; he loves just to say it. He kisses the auburn crown of her head.

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ she muses gently. ‘It’s as if the Fräulein has resorted to madness to save herself. As if delusion is her cure.’

  IT WAS MONDAY morning. The inmates of Ward B returned from laundry duty. They usually came back in groups of four or five, with lone stragglers taking up the rear. Today they invaded together, a raggle-taggle army on the move. Fräulein Unbekannt could hear the tone of agitated alarm in their voices, even before they came in. It was not the usual mélange of individual complaint; some common grievance animated them. Hilda Scharrel led the bunch. She marched up to the Fräulein’s bed. She was propped up on high pillows. Hilda noticed her pallor and that sour air of disengagement she gave off.

  ‘Fräulein, Fräulein,’ she said, ‘have you heard? They’re going to move us. Ship us off!’

  An orchestra of grumbles and sighs tuned up from the knot of inmates gathered at her back.

  ‘Nurse Bucholz told us at the laundry, let it slip more like, that Ward B is to be transferred, all of us, to another place, an asylum out in Brandenburg. In the middle of the country, God knows where. How will Jonah ever find me there?’

  ‘Well, I’m not going,’ Minna Heck declared. ‘I’m too old for shifting. Only way I’ll leave here is in a box.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Clara demanded.

  She pushed through the crowd. She was in her day clothes. She had been sitting on her bed beside her canvas bag of belongings all ready and prepared for Caspar, though he was not due until at least three p.m. All morning she had been watching Fräulein Unbekannt at the other end of the ward. Twenty of her halting steps would cover the distance between them, but the silence emanating from the Fräulein had defied her. Clara knew its tenor – hurt, haughty and despising. But this commotion had given her an excuse.

  ‘Nothing that need worry you, Clara,’ Hilda said, ‘you’re getting out.’

  ‘They’re moving the entire ward?’ Clara asked. ‘What about the Fräulein here?’ She cast an anxious glance at her. ‘She’s not well enough to be carted about the place.’

  ‘Everyone,’ Hilda said emphatically.

  Her tone defeated them. The others retreated to their beds, for once their gloom matching Fräulein Unbekannt’s.

  ‘I’ll come and visit,’ Clara said to her, ‘no matter where you are. I promise. I’ll find you.’

  But the Fräulein didn’t answer. Didn’t even seem to hear. She was miles away, in another world.

  Anastasia remains sickly, too frightened to reveal herself. Chased away by Nurse Malinovsky. When the Fräulein looks at her beloved, tattered photograph it no longer has the piteous gaze of an icon. It has the glassy look of history. Dead history. Where has she gone? What dark corner has she crept into? What is she afraid of? The Fräulein feels a motherly concern for her, wandering aimlessly through the wards, searching in the garden, pressing her nose against the window of the library (after all, that is where she was born). She wants to call out – Anastasia – making shushing sounds as if to a cowering kitten. But words, she knows, are useless.

  She watches Clara disconsolately as she paces up and down, clock-watches, checks her kitbag for the hundredth time as if there’s something she’s forgotten to put in. First Clara, and now the little princess, gone. Without Clara she would never have found Anastasia; now, she would have neither of them. Was it her fate always to be abandoned? Clara is desperate. Caspar will be arriving any minute now – she checks the clock, it is, in fact, only ten past one. She’s torn in two. She wants to go, she longs to stay. She hasn’t had the stomach for lunch. She’s been too busy racking her brains trying to think of some way to reach the Fräulein, who’s lying there like death warmed up. So frail and weak, Clara fears that she will simply fade away. What will the poor girl do, without Clara’s protection, lumped in with this lot? That Hilda, for example, likes to be top dog, Clara notes. She looks at them scraping their bowls, licking gruel from their ladles. The common mad, Clara thinks. Her Fräulein should not have to suffer them. She is too good, too fine, too noble to be locked away with them, with this. She surveys the crowded ward, the nonsense hum and idiotic babble
of it. Her poor Fräulein with nothing, without even a name. A name, she thinks, a name.

  Clara waits until the lunch trolley disappears. She waits until the inmates return to their beds. Some will read, others will fall into an afternoon drowse. She must act before that happens. She will need witnesses, even if they’re all mad. A nurse would be even better, but Clara cannot depend on the presence of their ladyships Walz or Bucholz. Never around when they’re needed. She roams in little circles, her bad hand is jumpy. She must be calm. Now she must be calm because later she will have to be mad. The clock shows two. It is time.

  She hurtles down the ward, jabbing her finger in the air and shouting at the top of her lungs. The sleepy and the dull regard her jadedly. Another Peuthert drama. But it’s spectacle if nothing else and so they watch – and witness.

  ‘I know you,’ Clara shrieks, ‘I know you.’

  The Fräulein looks aghast as Clara, hair adrift and spittle flying, lurches at her. She whisks the Illustrierte from underneath the pillow and waves it in the air.

  ‘I know you, I know you,’ she screams and stomps her foot.

  Slack-jawed the ward looks on. That’s curtains for her release, Hilda thinks; Clara will end up in the lock-ups for this.

  ‘You are Grand Duchess Tatiana!’

  The Fräulein’s face opens into a smile. She draws herself up in bed, leaning on her elbows. Clara has found the princess. Not lifeless in a photograph this time, but here at last, at home, within. And Clara can see her! The only trouble is, Clara being Clara, impetuous, wild-hearted, has picked the wrong princess. The Fräulein stretches out her fingers and lays them on Clara’s swinging arm. It seems to work magically. Clara halts in mid-shriek. The princess speaks.

  ‘I am Anastasia,’ she says carefully. ‘Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna!’

  The silence fairly thrums. Even the dwarf Hanna, sitting cross-legged on her bunk, and humming quietly to herself, stops.

  ‘Hear that, you cretins?’ Clara roars. ‘Did you hear that?’

  Dumbly they regard her. She turns and lunges out into the corridor, heading for the director’s office. Weak winter sun glares in her eyes. Fräulein Unbekannt has confessed, she wants to shout out, but there is no need to act mad out here. She tries to compose herself before she reaches the director’s office. Fräulein Unbekannt, the unknown one, has spoken, Clara practises, as she staggers and weaves. But she cannot contain herself. To me. To me!