‘Aunt Irina, what is it?’ Maxim asked, filled with concern.
It took her a little while to regain her equilibrium. Finally, she turned back to Maxim and said, in a very soft voice, ‘I loved him, you know. Oh please don’t misunderstand, there was never anything between us, he only had eyes for your mother. In fact, he never knew how I felt, I kept my feelings very carefully hidden.’ She paused, a faint smile flickered. ‘We were such good friends, he and I, and that’s how he thought of me, only a friend. I was, well, a sort of chum to him. A pal. But I fell in love with him when I first came to Berlin, when I first met Sigi and Ursula. I was so very fond of her too, she was my dear, dear friend.’ Irina sighed and looked at Maxim through eyes still moist. ‘Your father is the only man I’ve ever loved.’
Maxim rose, went and sat next to her on the sofa. ‘Oh Aunt Irina, Aunt Irina,’ he said quietly, taking her hand in his, staring into her face. ‘Whyever didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps I felt it was inappropriate, and anyway it’s so long ago now…’
‘Yes, it is,’ he said, holding her hand tighter than ever. ‘Now I know why you never married.’
‘Yes, you do.’
He put his arm around her and held her close, filled with compassion for her. And he could not help thinking how truly tragic Princess Irina Troubetzkoy’s life had been. After Maxim had left, Irina sat down on the sofa again, leaned back and closed her eyes, hoping to quieten her rapidly beating heart.
Every year that he came to Berlin to see her, Maxim talked to her about the same thing, and every time she answered him in the same way. She forever wished she had new and different answers for him, but she did not. Time changed nothing. And God knows she lived with the same questions herself. There was not a day went by that she did not think about Ursula and Sigmund and their tragic fates: Sigi executed in the most foul way at Buchenwald, Ursula beaten to death in Ravensbrück. She had always been relieved that Teddy had never told Maxim the truth about the way his mother had died, grateful that she had withheld the facts from him. How could the boy then, the man now, bear to hear anything as horrendous as that, cope with such awful knowledge?
Her friend from their resistance group, Maria Langen, who had been in Ravensbrück with Ursula and Renata, had told her many things when she had been released finally in the summer of 1944. Things she could hardly bear to hear at that time, or remember now. Unspeakable things. But remember she did; she could not get them out of her mind.
Maria had told her about a wall in Ravensbrück… a punishment wall. Women were taken to it and beaten unmercifully by the wardresses in the camp, beaten senseless, and then they were made to stand against the wall, even though they had no strength left. Maria had told her that their screams and cries and moans went on all day and all night, and that they were left against the wall in the rain and the most freezing weather, were never given anything to eat or drink, not even a drop of water.
According to Maria, Ursula had been taken to that wall so many times and beaten so relentlessly that Maria did not know how Ursula had lived as long as she had. Renata and Maria had crept out to the wall at night, trying to comfort Ursula, bringing her water, tending to her bleeding and battered body as best they could with bits of cloth torn from their own clothing. Every time they did this, they themselves were sent to the punishment wall the next day, and were beaten and left there with Ursula, but they had not cared about their punishment. They had always returned to look after Ursula, and had continued to do so defiantly until the day she had died against the wall in Renata’s arms.
They had such courage, Irina thought, unbelievable courage. They were both heroines and they paid with their lives, Renata in Ravensbrück, Maria after her release.
The manner in which Ursula and Sigmund had died was Irina’s nightmare, one that never went away. At least, not for very long. And it haunted her, year in and year out; it would continue to do so forever.
FORTY-FIVE
Maxim’s mind was focused on Irina as he rode back to the Kempinski Hotel in a taxi cab.
Her confession that she had been in love with his father had initially startled him, then he had experienced a rush of sympathy for her. Unrequited love was such a sad circumstance of life. He had not really known what to say to her, how to comfort her. Perhaps there was no comfort to give after all these years. Certainly she must have learned to live with her pain and disappointment by now.
He glanced out of the window as the cab raced down the Kurfurstendamm.
Berlin, he thought. It was forever nagging at the back of his mind when he was not there. Sometimes he felt that the city held a special secret for him, although in relation to what he did not know. There were times when he believed that he was pulled back because of nostalgia, his memories of his parents, his early life. But he was also aware now that he returned to see Irina Troubetzkoy.
When he had first gone back to the city of his birth in 1950, he had strongly sensed that she needed him. Now he truly understood why. He was the link to his parents, specifically to his father, apparently the love of her life.
In actuality, she represented the same thing to him… the link to the past. Irina had been his parents’ contemporary, their close friend, always in their company. Therefore she could tell him so much about them. More than Teddy could tell him, in certain ways. Irina and he had always talked about his parents, often at great length, and she frequently reminisced about the times they had spent together, and in a way this kept them alive. At any rate, it made them live again in her mind, and also in his, and thus it gave comfort to them both, and that was all that mattered.
It suddenly struck him that because he was his father’s son she might conceivably see him as her own child, the child she might have had with Sigmund, if the circumstances of their lives had been different.
Oh, the complexities of the human heart, he thought, and he was suddenly pleased that he had been taking care of her financially, and coming to see her every year. He was positive he helped her to feel less lonely and alone.
***
Maxim and Irina spent a wonderful evening together, as they always did when he came to Berlin. They talked and laughed, thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company over dinner, and then he took her dancing at one of the clubs on the Ku’damm, as he had promised earlier.
They were still laughing and talking when they left the club at two o’clock in the morning. Maxim took hold of her arm affectionately, and together they strolled along the Kurfurstendamm, enjoying the air. As was usual on a Saturday night, the club had been jammed with people and full of cigarette smoke, and in the last hour the atmosphere had become unbearable in the confined quarters. And even though it was still hot in the streets in the early morning hours of this August Sunday, they were both relieved to be outside.
They walked for about ten minutes, then Maxim hailed a passing cab. It stopped, and he helped Irina in, leapt inside after her. They had hardly settled back on the seat when the driver swung his head, stared hard at them in the dim light of the taxi, and said, ‘They’re building a barricade.’
‘Who are?’ Maxim asked, frowning, not understanding what the man meant.
‘The East Germans,’ the cab driver answered. ‘The Communists.’
Maxim felt Irina stiffen on the seat next to him, and he glanced at her quickly, before saying, ‘Where? Where are they building this barricade?’
‘On the Potsdamer Platz.’
‘We want to go in that direction anyway, so please take us there. I’d like to see what’s happening!’ Maxim exclaimed.
‘Right away,’ the driver replied, starting his engine.
The cab rolled down the Ku’damm, making for the Lützowufer, one of the streets leading into the Potsdamerstrasse, which in turn flowed into the Potsdamer Platz, at the juncture of the two zones.
Suddenly Irina said, ‘Too many people have been leaving East Germany this past year. Over two hundred thousand actually, and most
were young people.’
Maxim looked at her alertly. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
‘Yes. They’re not building a barricade to keep West Berliners out, it’s to keep East Berliners in, to prevent them crossing into the West Zone.’ She laughed hollowly. ‘That’s the communist regime for you. They have to encircle their people with barbed wire to keep them from fleeing.’
‘You’re absolutely right.’
Within minutes the cab was cruising down the Potsdamerstrasse, and both Maxim and Irina saw that a large crowd was already gathering in the area,—they exchanged worried glances.
‘We’ll get out here,’ Maxim said to the driver, who pulled in close to the kerb and braked. After helping Irina to alight, Maxim paid the cab, and the two of them hurried off in the direction of the Potsdamer Platz.
They were at once startled and dismayed at the sight that met their eyes. As they pushed through the crowds of people milling around, Maxim and Irina saw that immense rolls of barbed wire had been stretched across the square to block all movement between the East and West Zones. Border guards were still in the process of putting the wire in place; they worked to the sound of loud and ferocious jeering and catcalls and derisive whistling from the West Berliners who stood at the other side of the wire in the Western Sector, watching them. The guards erecting the barbed-wire barricade worked by the light of gigantic lamps, and they were backed up by tanks and heavily armed troops, who were now coming in by the truckload.
‘This whole thing has the look of a real military operation,’ Maxim said, turning to Irina, staring at her in concern.
She clung to his arm and he felt her shivering, despite the warmth of the August weather. ‘You can see that they mean business,’ she muttered. ‘What we’re going to have is a totally schizophrenic city. It was bad enough before, but it will only get worse from now on.’ She shivered again, clutched his arm more tightly. ‘Please, take me home, Maxim.’
‘Of course. Come on, let’s go, it’s getting very late.’
They swung around and walked away from the barricade, making for the Lützowufer.
At one moment Irina came to a sudden standstill, and pivoted to face Maxim. She said in an ominous voice, ‘Barbed wire won’t be enough for them. You’ll see, they’ll build a wall to divide Berlin.’
And Princess Irina Troubetzkoy was right; they did.
***
The Wall stretched for over one hundred miles and was nine feet in height. On one side, in the Eastern Sector, it was painted an antiseptic white; on the other, in the Western Sector, it was covered with colourful graffiti.
Maxim took Anastasia to look at the Wall when she came to Berlin with him in June of 1963. She had not been to Berlin for several years, and so she had not seen it before; like everyone else, she was not prepared for it, or for the feeling of revulsion it engendered in her.
‘But it’s so wrong!’ she cried, glancing from Maxim to Irina, who was accompanying them. ‘Totally and utterly wrong.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Maxim agreed.
‘Many people have been shot, trying to escape over the Wall,’ Irina explained. ‘However, many thousands more have made it over safely, have escaped to freedom here in the Western Zone.’ She shook her head, said derisively, ‘Communists! They make me sick.’
‘And me, too, Aunt Irina,’ Maxim remarked, and said to Anastasia, ‘Come on, let me show you the graffiti, I think you’ll find it interesting. In places it’s truculent, in others disparaging. It’s also humorous, sad, defiant. It runs the gamut, really.’ He took hold of Anastasia’s arm, and Irina’s, and together the three of them walked along, inspecting the colourful display.
‘The graffiti has been called the longest cartoon in the world,’ Irina told her. ‘Because, as you can see, it stretches for miles and miles.’
‘Some of the items are almost works of art,’ Maxim added, ‘they have been quite brilliantly executed.’
Since she painted herself, and was artistically inclined, Anastasia was fascinated by the graffiti, and she hovered in front of the Wall for quite a while. Later, Maxim took her up onto one of the viewing platforms which was twenty feet in height, and enabled her to look down into East Berlin on the other side of the Wall.
‘How dismal and unfriendly the streets seem,’ Anastasia muttered to Maxim, who stood next to her on the platform. ‘So desolate and empty. Where are all the people?’
Maxim shrugged. ‘I don’t know… working most probably. And I suppose there’s no special reason for those who are not working to be outside. I’ve noticed the streets every time I’ve come up here and looked over the Wall… so empty and depressing.’
‘It’s like a No Man’s Land,’ Anastasia said. ‘Different from West Berlin, where there’s so much life and activity and excitement.’
The three of them remembered Anastasia’s words the following day, when she and Maxim and Irina made their way to the Rudolf Wilde Platz. Maxim’s and Anastasia’s visit to Berlin coincided with that of President Kennedy, who was on a European tour, and hundreds of thousands of West Berliners were flooding into the streets, also making for the Schoneberg Town Hall in the platz. It was here that the president was going to speak, after his own visit to the Wall and the signing of the Golden Book in the town hall.
When President Kennedy finally came out, accompanied by Mayor Willy Brandt and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the crowd cheered and shouted, clapped and waved, and generally showed their approval of him. But when he began to speak they fell silent, and there was not a sound to be heard in the square, except for his words.
Anastasia craned her neck to see the handsome young American president, carefully listened to what he was saying.
Kennedy said: ‘I know of no town, no city, which has been besieged for eighteen years that still lives with the vitality and force, the hope and determination of the city of West Berlin. While the Wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction from it…’
President Kennedy paused, then concluded dramatically, ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.”’
The crowd went crazy on hearing these words, screaming and shouting wildly, and many of the West Berliners and foreigners alike had tears streaming down their faces. Anastasia, Maxim and Irina were also cheering the President of the United States, the three of them as touched and as moved by Kennedy’s speech as everyone else.
But suddenly Maxim sensed a feeling of hysteria growing in the air, and instinctively, protectively, he put his arms around Anastasia and Irina, pulled them closer to him. He could not help wondering if he had been wrong to bring them to this square today, which was jammed now with hundreds of thousands of people. How easily they could be trampled underfoot, and hurt, if the crowd went out of control. And it was not until he had brought the two women safely back to the suite in the Kempinski Hotel that he breathed easily again.
But a few months later he was to recall vividly those words he had heard in the Rudolf Wilde Platz in Berlin, and he was truly glad that he had gone to hear John Kennedy speak on that warm summer day in June.
FORTY-SIX
It was a radiant day.
The sky was a high blue and clear, and the sun was brilliant.
To Anastasia, Manhattan looked as if it had been well and truly polished. The skyscrapers and other buildings appeared to shine on this crisp Friday morning as she walked across Fifth Avenue in the direction of Bergdorf Goodman.
Within seconds she was pushing through the swing doors into the exclusive department store, and taking the elevator up to the children’s department. Yesterday, when she had been browsing, she had noticed a pretty party dress she hoped would be the right size for two-year-old Alix and several other items that had looked perfect for the new baby. Their son Michael was now eighteen months old and growi
ng rapidly.
Anastasia smiled to herself as she thought of them. The Venetian babies, Maxim called them, since both of their children had been conceived in Venice, Alix on their honeymoon, Michael in August, when they had gone there for a second honeymoon.
She missed her children terribly, even though she and Maxim had only been in New York for a week; she worried about them, despite the fact that they had their nanny, Jennifer, with them, and also Mrs Woodson, the housekeeper-cook who looked after the whole family so well. Plus her mother, who had flown over from Paris to stay at the Mayfair house while she was absent with Maxim on this business trip.
I shouldn’t be so jittery, she thought, as she stepped out of the elevator. They’re in such good hands. Even so she hated to be parted from her children, who along with her husband were her whole world. She wanted little else except the three of them. She loved them so very much.
To Anastasia’s delight the pink organdie dress was still on the display stand, and she stood eyeing it appraisingly for a moment, picturing her blonde blue-eyed little daughter wearing it.
A moment later a sales lady was by her side, confirming that the dress was the right size, and taking it off the stand. While the dress was being wrapped in tissue paper, placed in a silver box and tied with a purple ribbon, Anastasia looked at romper suits and tiny shirts for Michael, and purchased three of each.
Twenty minutes later she was riding down in the elevator carrying two large shopping bags. She glanced at her watch as she left the store. It was a few minutes to one and she would be exactly on time to meet Maxim. They had arranged to have lunch together in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, just across the little square from the store.
As she went up the steps and into the hotel, Anastasia was not aware of the flurry she created, nor did she notice the admiring glances cast in her direction. At twenty-two she was more beautiful than ever, her skin glowing and full of health and vitality, her long blonde hair upswept on top of her head today. She wore a dark ranch mink coat which Maxim had bought her several days ago, high-heeled black patent pumps and long cream suede gloves. Small diamonds sparkled in her ears and a pearl choker encircled her neck.