Authors: Mary Jane Staples
As soon as the afternoon visitors were ushered in by Frau von Rathlef, the woman pressed a handkerchief to the right side of her mouth, hiding the disfiguration of a jaw that had been broken. Even allowing for that, one could not have said she was attractive, for suffering had wasted her, her face was bony and some front teeth had been knocked out. But she did have assets. Her hands were graceful, her fingers long and fine, her neck delicately slim. Also, she had beautiful blue eyes, and her brown hair showed tints of gold.
Sitting on the very edge of the chair, as if poised for nervous flight, she glanced up at the visitors, her expression discouraging. She was never enthusiastic about visitors, and she considered Frau von Rathlef a trial at times in persuading her to meet people she did not want to. Mr Gibson was intent not on her discouraging expression, but on discovering the blue of her eyes.
In London, Sir Douglas had said to him, ‘If you do decide to see her, there’s only one way you can satisfy yourself she may be credible. She has to have blue eyes of a striking kind. They’re a feature of the Romanov family. The Tsar and his daughters Olga, Marie and Anastasia all had memorable blue eyes.’
The eyes of the sick woman were a magnificent, clear blue, a breathtaking blue. Mr Gibson was spellbound. Natasha had blue eyes, a dark blue that sometimes looked like violet. The woman’s eyes were a different blue, the blue of sunlit Pacific seas.
Natasha, whose emotions had been of a sensitive kind all day, trembled as she too looked into the eyes of the woman. Then, to Mr Gibson’s astonishment, she dipped in a curtsey that seemed emotionally compulsive. And he heard
a husky whisper in English, a language daily used by the Tsar and Tsarina when conversing with each other.
‘Your Imperial Highness …’
The woman, handkerchief still pressed to the side of her mouth, stared down at the bent head as Natasha’s curtsey lingered.
‘Who are you?’ she asked in German. She did not speak German well, but it was the language she invariably used. She looked up at Frau von Rathlef. ‘Who is she? Do I know her? Does she know me?’ Mr Gibson noted she was not in contention with the way Natasha had addressed her, but with what she was doing here. ‘Why has she come to see me? Who is she?’ Surprisingly, her voice was crisp, the words coming in staccato leaps from her tongue.
‘She is a young lady who apparently believes in you,’ said Frau von Rathlef.
Natasha straightened, but kept her head bent low. She was trembling.
‘Believes in me?’ said the woman. ‘Why does she have to believe in me? I am myself, she is herself. Does she ask people to believe in her?’
‘That is not the friendliest way to receive her,’ said Frau von Rathlef, whose temperament gave her the patience and tolerance necessary when
dealing with the difficult moods of the woman claiming to be Anastasia. She was undeviating in her supportive role, and unfailing in her understanding. ‘She is Natasha Petrovna Chevensky, and here also is her friend, Herr Philip Gibson from England. I told you they were coming to see you.’
Mr Gibson delivered a courteous little bow. ‘Good afternoon, madam,’ he said in English, ‘and thank you for allowing us to come.’
The woman, who was regarding Natasha with an almost painful intensity, as if making a tortured search of her memory, transferred her gaze to Mr Gibson. If Natasha had been extraordinarily moved the moment she came face to face with the patient, Mr Gibson felt profoundly touched.
‘From England?’ she said. ‘From England you are?’
‘I am,’ he said.
Her nervous edge melted under a sudden eager curiosity, and he experienced a strange feeling that a lively and inquisitive girl was trying to surface.
‘Who has sent you?’ The blue eyes were bright. ‘Uncle Georgy?’
Uncle Georgy undoubtedly meant King
George, the late Tsar’s cousin. King George was the son of Queen Alexandra, and the Tsar had been the son of Alexandra’s sister, Marie.
‘I assume you’re referring to King George,’ said Mr Gibson.
The woman looked puzzled, as if his comment did not make sense. ‘Uncle Georgy, yes,’ she said. ‘Did he send you?’
‘I’m sure he’s interested in you,’ said Mr Gibson.
The woman’s eyes filled with blue-grey clouds, and she pressed the handkerchief more tightly to her jaw. Her forehead creased in a frown. It was always an effort to dig into a memory impaired by blows to her skull.
She said in a vague way, ‘That man – yes – he spoke about England.’
‘Which man?’ asked Frau von Rathlef, always eager to note down anything new from the patient.
‘He said—’ The woman mentally groped. ‘Yes, he said – he would send us there. To England.’
‘Who said that?’ asked Frau von Rathlef.
‘That man – what was his name?’ The woman struggled. Then her eyes gleamed. ‘Yes, Alexander Fedorovich.’
‘Oh, you mean Kerensky,’ said Frau von Rathlef, with a smile.
Kerensky, Mr Gibson knew, had been the leader of the Provisional Government of Russia after the Tsar’s enforced abdication. Kerensky had made himself responsible for keeping the Imperial family in protective custody until a decision had been reached about what to do with them. Kerensky’s attitude towards the Tsar was quite devoid of malice, but he and the Provisional Government had fallen to the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and the attitude of the latter meant there was no escape for the Romanovs.
‘Yes, Kerensky,’ said the woman. ‘Yes.’ Her eyes expressed disillusionment. ‘But we went to Siberia instead. There was no one to help us, no one.’ She looked up again at Mr Gibson. ‘Always like that it was. No one to help us, no one we could trust.’ She spoke in German to Frau von Rathlef. ‘Why has he come here from England?’
‘To see you, to talk to you.’
Again the woman looked at Mr Gibson, and he thought there was a silent sigh of bitter resignation about her. Still in German, she said to him, ‘I have been turned into a circus.’
‘That is not true,’ said Frau von Rathlef, ‘and you should not say it.’
‘I have also been very ill.’
Natasha, whose emotions were still perceptibly on the brink, said impulsively, ‘Oh, but you are so much better than I could ever have expected.’
Mr Gibson caught the gist of that remark, delivered in German. Frau von Rathlef stared keenly at Natasha.
‘You have seen the Grand Duchess before?’ she said.
‘I – I – no—’ Natasha faltered. It was all inside her. It had burst out once, but the monarchists who had listened had told her she was mad, and would be locked up in an asylum if she ever repeated it. Because she was in the presence of the tragic Grand Duchess, because she alone of all the people in Berlin knew her story to be true, there was a desperate longing to say what her heart demanded she should. But there was Mr Gibson, life’s most precious gift to her in seven long, tormented years. Never could she do anything to put him in danger. The monarchists were so powerful and so violently opposed to recognition of the Grand Duchess. They would destroy Mr Gibson if they suspected
he too had listened to all she had to say about what had happened at Ekaterinburg. They were in league with a man called Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party, an organization ready to use violence to achieve power. Even murder, some people said. The monarchists contributed to their party funds, for Hitler, it was said, would destroy Communism and the Bolsheviks.
‘Have you answered Frau von Rathlef’s question, Natasha?’ Mr Gibson’s level voice reached into her heart.
‘Yes. I mean no, I haven’t seen the Grand Duchess before.’
‘Then I am very touched, Fräulein, that you acknowledged her,’ said Frau von Rathlef.
‘Many years ago,’ said the woman in her thick, accented German, ‘I was innocent and trusting. We never thought there could be a world in which it was best to believe no one and to trust no one. We never thought we would be deserted, that no one would care about us.’ The striking blue eyes clouded again, then cleared as she said to Mr Gibson in English, ‘Your young lady is very pretty.’
‘A picture,’ said Mr Gibson, and the woman’s pale lips twitched in a jerky smile. ‘Enchanting,
I think,’ he added, and did not notice Natasha’s rush of colour, for the jerky smile flowered and became brilliant. It was the leap of light into the blue eyes that made it brilliant, and it created for him the image of a laughing, precocious girl. The Grand Duchess Anastasia had been born twenty-four years ago. At that age, if she were alive, she would not be far removed from the days when she had been irrepressibly precocious.
‘Some pictures are very pretty,’ said the woman, ‘and some are not.’ Her brightness faded, and the blue eyes became full of dark reflections, reflections that made her press the handkerchief over her mouth.
‘I think your visitors should be asked to sit down, don’t you?’ said Frau von Rathlef, interjecting a note of practical courtesy. She pushed chairs forward for Natasha and Mr Gibson. Her interest in the patient’s reactions to every visitor never abated, and she gently encouraged agreeable conversation. She did not direct its course, however, and she did not suggest the visitors should ask questions.
Mr Gibson made easy conversation, Natasha contributed remarks shy and nervous, and the woman’s response was relevant at times, and
quite irrelevant at others. Her tongue wandered about in the fashion of a person who found it difficult to concentrate. Doctors, however, had agreed that blows violent enough to fracture her skull could have impaired her powers of concentration, as well as her memory.
Mr Gibson studied her. While her conversation was not brilliant, there were intelligent passages, and there were also moments when she pounced on a point and delivered a comment in a bitingly lucid way. But he thought it was her movements and gestures that were more telltale to a questing observer. He felt she possessed an ingrained refinement and gracefulness that one could easily identify with a person of royal upbringing. The daughters of kings and emperors applied themselves naturally to the art of grace and deportment. This woman’s grace could not be faulted. And for all her ill-health, the clarity of her blue eyes was a thing of wonder. What was in her mind most of the time? If she was Anastasia, she had so much to remember, so much that was associated with majesty, with the glitter of palaces and the radiance of summers in the Crimea.
‘What was it like, madam, the world you loved and lost?’ he said, and was immediately
in disgust at himself for the sickly stupidity of his question.
The woman stared at him, then seemed to bring words out of nowhere. ‘When we were young, we called ourselves OTMA.’
‘OTMA?’ said Natasha, hands in her lap, eyes sometimes cast down and sometimes essaying sensitive glances.
‘It was made up of the initials of the Grand Duchesses’ names,’ said Frau von Rathlef. ‘Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia. But of course,’ she added, ‘many people knew that.’ The rider was a frank concession to the fact that sceptics and disbelievers held to the opinion that the woman had made an exhaustive study of the daily lives of the Imperial family.
‘OTMA, yes,’ said the woman softly, and her eyes darkened and her mouth became pinched with pain. The handkerchief was still there, hiding the disfiguration most of the time.
Mr Gibson wondered. Was she the Tsar’s youngest daughter? Was her pain to do with memories of a family she had loved, a family that had been murdered? Natasha showed similar pain at times. Her family too had been murdered. Why did so notable a figure as George Bernard Shaw condemn the excesses of
capitalism, and commend a political system that had come into being over the murdered bodies of millions? Was it systems that were important and not people? If Natasha were to be brought to England, Mr Shaw might perhaps like to listen to what she had to say about Bolshevism or Communism. The one was the same as the other.
If this frail woman really was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, there was tragic torment in not being accepted by her relatives. Mr Gibson could not fault her delicacy, but he could not himself say whether she was Anastasia or not. He could only say that if she had been introduced to him as a Grand Duchess in circumstances free from all mystery and controversy, he would not have questioned it. Her looks, affected by wounds and suffering, would have been irrelevant.
Amid his reflections, he heard Natasha suddenly speak in what he guessed was Russian. Although the conversation had been marked by little pauses, as if the woman needed to collect her thoughts, an agreeable atmosphere had been established and Natasha was coming in on cue. What it was she said, however, Mr Gibson did not know.
‘Your Imperial Highness, the world has been very cruel to you, but to be alive and to know life still has some sweetness – oh, I would not want bad memories to rob me of that, would you?’
Without hesitation, the woman replied, although in German. ‘It is very difficult, Natasha Petrovna, to enjoy even the smallest sweetness when the memories of the cruelty are so interfering.’
Natasha glanced at Mr Gibson, her expression one of appeal. Mr Gibson, knowing the woman had understood what the girl had said, smiled and nodded.
Frau von Rathlef, observant, said, ‘It’s not true, you see, that she doesn’t understand Russian, and I hope you will carry that information to everyone you know.’
‘I am very tired,’ said the woman, and sounded so.
Mr Gibson came to his feet at once, and Natasha rose with him. He thanked the patient for receiving them and for talking to them. Natasha again curtseyed, and the patient regarded her with a faraway smile.
Accompanying the departing visitors to the main door of the clinic, Frau von Rathlef said,
‘Thank you for being so understanding, for not pressing questions on her. Will you tell me your impressions, Herr Gibson?’
‘As an outsider, what can I say?’ said Mr Gibson. ‘Only that if she had been acknowledged as the Grand Duchess, I couldn’t have declared she wasn’t. She is refined enough. The relatives and friends who did acknowledge her originally, but subsequently changed their minds, may have based their change of mind on certain characteristics that would mean nothing to me.’