He paused and narrowed his eyes.
‘If things should ever change in Russia, that girl could be our passport, do you hear?’
His wife, given to emotion, released a volley of sobs. Gerda bristled with resentment. It was not her job to be a minder.
‘She has lost track of time,’ Gerda said. ‘She cannot even read the clock.’
‘She knows the difference between night and day,’ her father barked. ‘It’s been three days now.’
‘Where shall I look?’ Herr Jaenicke interjected, hoping to dispel the air of tense recrimination.
‘Ach, Mann, who knows?’ the baron snapped.
‘Try that Peuthert woman again,’ Gerda whispered to him on his way out. ‘The two of them were thick as thieves.’
But Clara would not even open the door to him. She shouted through the keyhole instead.
‘How should I know where the little tramp is? I know where she should be. In the madhouse. If you find her, bring her back there. That’s where she belongs.’
Herr Jaenicke approaches Fräulein Anni carefully. He does not wish to alarm her, or to lose his prize by scaring her off. The timbers of the little bridge creak as he tiptoes up to her, but she does not even lift her head. She is deep in leafy concentration.
‘Fräulein Anni,’ he greets her, conversationally.
She looks up at him as he sidles up to her and smiles at him vaguely.
‘Herr Jaenicke,’ he says as if to explain himself. ‘You look lost.’
‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘I like the water. It’s restful, don’t you think?’
Herr Jaenicke remembers her dangerous predilection for water.
‘Home to the unhappy dead,’ she says.
‘Quite,’ Herr Jaenicke says. ‘Now, Fräulein, don’t you think it’s time for you to come home?’
He lightly touches her forearm. She stiffens. He wants to grip her elbow and steer her away from here. Her unpredictable air of distraction fills him with unease.
‘Fräulein, I beseech you, come with me now before there is any more trouble.’
‘Trouble?’ she all but screeches.
He darts his eye around to check that no one is watching. A passer-by could well mistake this scene for a lover’s tiff, and him for a bullying suitor.
‘What do you know of trouble, Herr Jaenicke?’ she hisses.
This is getting out of hand, he thinks. Short of manhandling her, he cannot imagine how he will ever get her to budge. He tries one last desperate measure.
‘Your Imperial Highness,’ he ventures and offers her his hand.
Surprisingly, she takes it and smiling, not at him but to herself, allows him to lead her over the water and along a shaded path towards his waiting motor.
Berlin, 17 February 1920
THE WOMAN STANDS on the footbridge and stares down into the inky waters of the Landwehr Canal below. It is a metal bridge, half-mooned, with intricate cast-iron work. A gas lantern poised in the centre of it is held up by two curlicued struts which arc prayerfully overhead. Sleet sprinkles in its glow. Passers-by swaddled in scarves and hats hurry past, bent against unforgiving weather, intent on their destination. Their footsteps ring out metallic in the crisp air, their warm exhaled breath hangs in urgent, puffy clouds.
The woman pays no heed to the scurry of the toiling pedestrians. Despite her heavy black skirts, and her boots laced up to the knee, her feet and legs are numb. Beneath her linen sleeves goose-pimples sprout. She is not dressed for the weather; rather she looks as if she has just stepped outside on a quick errand. A young woman, she is small, thick-set, with dark hair pulled back from a high brow and knotted at the nape of her neck. Her lips are fleshy and could be described as sensuous but for their slight downturn which hints sourly at recurring humiliation. Her face, in repose, is mournful, dour even. From where we stand it is not possible to see her eyes, which are a pale slatey grey, though in sunnier moods they lighten to blue. She wears a tobacco-coloured shawl over her shoulders. It has a threadbare, lovelorn look. She is crying, silently, though she hardly notices her own tears. They are partly the product of the biting wind, partly the fruit of a despair which has gone beyond self-pity. She has no pity left for herself.
She is about to plunge into the water.
Her name is Franziska Schanzkowska. She is twenty-three years old. How small and sad the details of the suicidal. When she clambers onto the pedestal of the bridge and stands, gripping the high strut with her arm, she will look like the proud figurehead on a ship leaning out fearlessly over the waves. And then she will pause, arms aloft as if she is about to fly. It will be a fateful hesitation. For the man standing by the ruined fence at the water’s edge, hands sunk deep into his pockets, stamping his feet on the trampled grass to keep warm, she will look like a creature of the night, a bat with extended wings glimpsed in silhouette. He will not have time to form a word of warning, just a strangulated cry like the one which jolts a dreamer awake from a nightmare, as she falls, her clothes flapping heavily like sailcloth. Down, down, she will rush. Headlong. Her intricate store of memories will drown as she enters the freezing water in an icy spray. It is what she wants. To escape memory. To become innocent. To enter history.
Yekaterinburg, Russia, July 1918
PAPA! EMPEROR AND Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Grand Prince of Smolensk, Prince of Estonia, Hereditary Lord and Suzerain of the Circassian Princes and Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir to the Throne of Norway … Papa! They call him Nicholas the Bloody. Mother is ‘that German bitch’.
It is hot here; the rooms swelter. The windows have been painted shut, the glass has been whitewashed. It is like living in a blind blizzard. We cannot see the street outside because of the stockade they have built around the house. But when they do allow us out, to circle in the trodden yard, we can hear the sounds from Voznesensky Prospekt. The scuff of feet on the dusty street, the clop of horses’ hooves, the breeze riffling through the leaves of linden trees. Yekaterinburg is a fine city. Ivanov, the barber who came to cut Papa’s and Baby’s hair, has told us of the sweeping Municipal Gardens skirting the city’s lake, the gold and malachite in the hills. There are two grand hotels, the America and the Palais. I don’t suppose that we shall ever visit them. We can see the golden dome of the cathedral. It faces our house, our prison, the Ipatiev House, but we cannot enter it. It is forbidden. So much is forbidden to us. Nuns from the monastery leave eggs and milk on the doorstep, but the soldiers take them. We have to make do with leavings, black bread, rewarmed cutlets from the guards’ room. Fifteen of us take turns to use the five forks they have allowed us. We must share cutlery with our jailers.
The days are long; so little happens. We read – old newspapers, the same old battered books. We play bezique. Mama stays abed. She prays. God will save us, she says, God will save us. Papa says the White Army will come; they will save us. During the night we hear them. Well, we hear the lonely snap of gunfire. Baby’s knee is stiff. He rode his sled down the stairs at the house in Tobolsk, where we were held before. I remember the terrible crash as he tumbled down one flight, then two. Everything falls. And then the bleeding started. Baby bruises easily and then he bleeds. Mama’s little Sunbeam.
I should have been a boy. We all should. First Olga, then Tatiana and Maria. When I was born, Papa had to go for a long walk in the woods at Peterhof, so great was his disappointment. The curse of a fourth daughter instead of a longed-for heir, a first son. And then, Baby came. What joy! We would be nothing without him. We were nothing without him. It is not that we were not loved, but we were incomplete. All hope rested in him, the boy who would be tsar.
What will become of us? What will become of us that has not already, Olga says. We have come as low as it is possible. We live like captive dogs. No, dogs would be treated better. Our dogs, anyway. Once our guards were respectful. Even in the Winter Palace – we girls were all sick with the measles, all our hair shorn off, Mama was at her wits’ en
d – they granted us our privacy. But now we are gone beyond such civility. Now they treat us as if we are guilty of something. What have we done? The worst of it is going to the lavatory; they will not let us close the door. They watch us as we … they watch us. It is all dirt. Enough!
Once, when we were in Tobolsk, I saw Gleb. Baby’s playmate, son of our dear doctor. He was standing on the street below. I was trying to loosen the window, just a fraction, to let in some air. Sometimes I think they mean to kill us by suffocation. I stood up on the sill to get more leverage and there he was, standing, looking up, shading his eyes with this hand against the glare of the afternoon sun. He waved to me, I am sure he did. I was so excited to see him. Dear, darling Gleb. He used to do funny drawings that made us laugh. I wanted to shout out at him, afraid he couldn’t see me. He waved again and then a soldier came and pushed him away. I felt my heart sink. No, don’t go! Gleb bowed to me before the ugly brute hustled him away. I was still standing on the sill when one of our guards came into the room and pointed a rifle at me.
‘Citizen Romanova, get down at once,’ he shouted. ‘You have been warned to stay away from the windows.’
I crouched down, trying to get down from such height with some degree of decorum. By right he should have turned his back, or offered me his hand.
‘The commissar will have to be informed of this,’ he said.
I slid down and righted my dress, my hair. I could feel my face flush.
‘No, no, please, don’t do that.’
‘You could be sending messages to the enemy.’
‘I was just waving, that is all, to Gleb.’
How could Gleb be anyone’s enemy?
‘He is our friend.’
‘I could be your friend,’ he said.
He smirked. He put his lips around the barrel of his rifle.
We had to play the piano for them in the evenings in the drawing room. One of us would be sent for. Olga sometimes, or Tatiana. My playing wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t read their music. Their common, vulgar anthems. ‘You Fell as Victim to the Struggle’, ‘Get Cheerfully in Step, Comrade’, ‘You Don’t Need a Golden Idol’.
I died there, yes, I died. The girl I was. Skewered to the floor by a boy who had smiled at me in the corridor. There were freckles on the bridge of his nose. He would turn his back when I used the lavatory, while the others laughed and stared. Now he was staring at me as if I were nothing, a bag of meal. He knelt down and put his ear close to my mouth. He smelt of sweaty fear and spirits. I thought he was going to whisper something to me, a secret, a prayer. My lips were parched.
‘Do not touch me,’ I said to him, ‘I am your sovereign.’
He started back, aghast. Then he lifted his rifle butt and smashed it down.
Their excitement, our terror, it was hard to tell the difference in the stench of blood and the high, piercing panic. It was a clammy summer’s night. The heat had made them sweat. They sweated as we bled, it was an exchange. Their sweat, our blood. Stubble on their chins as they rummaged among us with their boots, mud caked on their toecaps. The sweet smell of warm, oozing blood. The air palpitating. The shudder of exhaled breath, a hoarse groan, the tiny twitching of limbs after death. They gathered at the doorway when it was all over. One of them struck a match, a searing sulphurous sizzle, and lit a cigarette. They passed it around among themselves, inhaling greedily. The smell of Papa. Papa! Save me!
He saved me once before. From the sea at Livadia. We were in the water, great waves of warm surf. Olga, Tatiana, Maria. And Papa. We rose to the crest of a wave, up, up, then down. Plunging beneath the boiling sea, all greeny, thrashing overhead. I see them bobbing, Maria’s pale legs, Olga’s striped bathing costume, Tatiana’s hair in weeping ropes. My sisters, lost to me. Then Papa’s hand catches me by the hair and drags me up, up out of the angry deep. I gasp, inhale great lungfuls of blue air. Baby claps his hands together on the beach. He thinks it all some great joke.
God saved me. No, Tatiana did, she fell on top of me, she shielded me. She is dead because of me. No, the jewels saved me. Mama had us sew them into the seams of our corsets.
I thought they were going to take a photograph. That is how we were arranged. Mama, Papa, Baby in front, the rest of us behind. They roused us in the middle of the night, Dr Botkin rapping at Papa’s door at two a.m. on the orders of Yurovsky. We must be moved for our own safety. We washed and dressed. Papa carried Baby in his arms; his knee, you see, was still stiff, he couldn’t walk. Tatiana held Jimmy, our darling spaniel. There was Anna Demidova, Mama’s maid, Alexei Trupp, Papa’s valet, the cook, Ivan Kharitonov and Yevgeny Sergeyevich, our dear doctor. How reduced we are! We trooped downstairs, through the empty first floor and down another staircase, out of a doorway and into the courtyard. Oh, the night, how still it was. Summer in full reign. Yurovsky led us to a doorway into the basement. We followed him through a series of hallways. This is where the guards must sleep. The air was foul; we were below ground. We were shown into a small room with a vaulted ceiling. It was entirely empty. It had one sunken barred window and wallpaper, striped wallpaper, I remember.
‘Why is there no chair here?’ Mama asked. ‘Is it forbidden for us to sit?’
She was leaning on her cane; it pained her to stand. Yurovsky ordered chairs. Mama sat on one. Papa with Baby on his lap on the other. They were going to take our photograph.
The soldiers filed into the room. Ten soldiers. I counted them. They stood all in a row behind Yurovsky. Too close to take a picture; they would never get all of us in. A strip of bare floor separated us, that is all. Yurovsky stepped forward. He had a piece of paper in his hand, a small piece, a little scrap. He began to read from it.
‘In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.’
‘What? What?’ Papa says.
How sweet the silence was after all the frenzied clamour. They had howled as they shot us, barking and baying like hounds to drown out our cries and their deed. And now there was only an exhausted silence. It was so silent I feared they would hear the blinking of my eyelids.
I played dead. I closed my eyes and imagined myself away. It was a game I used to play in the long hours of our captivity. It was a kind of escape. I would pick a girl out on the street, a factory worker, a peasant girl, it didn’t matter, and wonder – what if I were her? It was a treacherous thought; there is nothing accidental about birth. We were born to rule. But it pleased me to consider what my life would be like were I not Grand Duchess Anastasia, but someone other. A nobody, a girl of no importance.
Berlin, August 1914
BERLIN WAS A city at war, but when Franziska Schanzkowksa alighted from the train she stepped into a sea of children, scabby, barefoot and raucous from the sun. Hundreds of the city’s needy young had been sent on free expeditions to the Wannsee because of the great heat. For days on end the barometer had registered 86°F in the shade; there was not a puff of wind; the stagnant canals stank. After several hours standing in the stifling heat of the corridor Franziska had got a seat in a crowded brown compartment, crushed against the window. Once she had stowed her case on the overhead rack (it was the case her mother had brought from Poznan on her wedding night), Franziska had concentrated on looking outside the train at the fleeing countryside. The fleet-footed zebra stripe of silver birches, the brown frown of furrowed fields, the scattering of cattle freckling the tussocky meadows flew by as if they were as intent on change as Franziska was. At first she measured the journey by reciting the names of towns to herself as they passed – Slupsk, Karwice, Koszalin; these she knew from her father’s lips. But after a while the little huddled towns and the weathered-looking stationhouses bore names she had never heard of. They all began to look the same, and not much different from what she had left. And there was something depressing about the eager faces of the shawlies who rushed up to the windows of the train at each station, offering up their battered baskets of
bread rolls and hollering their prices as if they were pious imprecations. She turned her attention inward. Two men sitting opposite in army greatcoats had struck up a conversation. One was a dark man, heavy-set and florid with thinning hair and, as if in compensation, an elaborately curled handlebar moustache the kaiser would have been proud of. The other, a much younger man, was pale-eyed and slack-jawed with a protruding Adam’s apple which looked as if it must hurt him to swallow. They were both in the reserves and were returning from exercises. At least that’s what Franziska thought they said. The men’s accents were heavy and strange. German in their mouths sounded nothing like the language she knew. Exercises. She could think only of the arm-swinging and leg-shaking that Miss Tupalska had ordered in the midwinter schoolroom to keep their circulation going. But that did not seem the sort of thing that would keep an empire’s army in shape. For the first time she felt a pang of fear – what if she couldn’t understand anyone? What if no one could understand her? She smiled nervously to stem her own panic and the young man opposite caught her eye.
‘Fräulein!’ he said and dipped his head slightly.
Franziska blushed.
‘No German,’ she mumbled, though it was not true, and looked away.
Her silence discouraged him. She turned back towards the window and, closing her eyes, she feigned sleep.
It was late in the evening when they entered the city. The fields and small stations had given way to tall chimney stacks belching out smoke against a ruby summer sunset. Streets bathed in the sun’s bloody glow faded into waste ground or lost themselves in coal-dusted arches. At eye-level, a land-locked basin lapped rosily against a weed-choked embankment. Then they were climbing. High up, they cut through boulevards dotted with gaslight; the gables of apartment buildings rushing to meet at street corners like the proud hulls of ships, then veering away into long, vertiginous perspectives. The flinty gaze of walleyed warehouses flashed by, the open mouths of tenements gaped. The train wormed its way into the saw-toothed silhouette of the city, deep into its sooted tunnels, hooting self-importantly as it bridged latticed metalwork before elbowing its way with a weary belch into the station, leaving Franziska on Platform 2 stranded in a crowd of sunburned orphans.
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