City of Shadows

  “Cheka,” Anna parroted. “They want to kill me.”

  “I know how they feel.”

  “Want a dog.”

  Natalya would appeal to Esther. “She’s mad, she’s bloody mad.”

  And Esther would think, Probably. But perhaps so is the man she’s scared of. At nights, in an apartment darkened by constant electricity cuts, fear was infectious. The silence from the empty flat below was pronounced. A creak on the stairs made them all jump. More than once Esther went out on the landing to peep down the stairwell—and saw nothing. Every night, before going to bed, she made sure that windows were tightly closed and their front door bolted.

  When Nick returned from Tante Swanny’s funeral, Esther told him, “Think what you like, but on October twenty-first I want this place protected.”

  “That another sixth weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  He humored her. “Sure, sure, you can have Theo spend the night, two nights. Want I should set up a machine-gun nest?”

  “Theo will do.”

  His mind was on his new conquest in the South of France. “I tell you, Esther, this is the one, completely, you should see her.”

  They were always the one, completely. “Another thing, Nick, we think it’s time Nasha went back to her old job.”

  “That’s right,” Natalya said. “I’ll stay on to keep the girls company, but I’d like to start back at the Parrot at nights. I done what I can here, and I got my career to think of.”

  Nick turned on her in a temper. “Your job’s finished when I say it is.”

  A shouting match ended in Natalya’s stomping out of the room.

  “For God’s sake, Nick,” Esther said.

  “She’s a blabbermouth. I’m not having her selling grand-duchess stories to the papers before I’m ready.” He relapsed into sentiment.

  “Eloise, now . . . Esther, you should meet her. She’s got royal blood in her veins, this one. A real Bourbon. Descendant of Louis XIV.” He sighed at his plethora of noblewomen. “I tell you, I’d marry her ...but then I maybe have to marry Anna, so I think, wait a bit. That’s my trouble, too many damn princesses.”

  “Must be a problem,” she said. “Nick, you should let Natalya go.”

  “No. She’ll give the game away before I’m ready. She’s getting double pay—what more does she want? No, she’s hired for the fucking duration.”

  “And how long is that going to be?”

  “When I make my plans. You think you can raise a grand duchess from the grave just like that? You got to set the stage—international press, lights. Maybe I’ll hire Tchaikovsky for the music. He writes a nice tune.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “He is? Okay, somebody else. But first we got to get her authenticated.”

  SEEING IT AS a democratic duty to her student, Esther tried to interest Anna in why the Czar of All the Russias had fallen.

  Anna believed that the situation was straightforward and temporary. The czar (good) had been toppled by the Bolsheviks (bad)—and the Jews had a hand in it somewhere. His people would soon see this. Soviet Russia would be returned to the good days of the monarchy.

  “They weren’t good days, and they won’t come back,” Esther told her. “Whatever happens, the world has changed forever.” She wanted the girl to gain a different perspective of the Batiushka-Czar, father of the Russian people, and a revolution that had shifted the earth’s political axis. Outside Czarskoe Selo, the czar’s peasants had lived in a famine-stricken Middle Ages, his Jews in terror, and his Moslems consistently harassed by the Russian Orthodox Church. He’d employed, and listened to, ministers who regarded liberalization as a senseless dream— an immediate challenge to the revolutionaries.

  “They warned him, Anna. Time and again he was told what would happen.”

  Anna wasn’t interested. “Was a good man,” she said. “You think Russia better now, under Bolsheviks?”

  Forcing Natalya’s memory of those precarious days was disturbing areas of it she’d suppressed for her own good. “Getting as bad as you,” she said to Esther. “I’m having nightmares.”

  “Do I have nightmares?”

  “I hear you shouting sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry,” Esther said. In her dreams her head turned into a cinema in which she sat alone. The soundtrack screamed. On the screen was slaughter, frame by frame. “What are your nightmares about?”

  “Ma and Pa. I know they’re dead, but I want to know what happened to them. Nobody don’t seem to know what the Reds did to the servants that went to Ekaterinburg with the family.”

  Only recently had anybody been able to find out what had happened to the family itself. The British government had promised Kerensky to send a warship to fetch them but had dithered; Prime Minister Lloyd George was reluctant to offer asylum, and King George, though fearful for his cousin, did not want to court unpopularity with his anticzarist public. With the collapse of the Kerensky government in 1917, it was too late anyway. Overnight a new man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, stood at the head of a new Soviet state. Czar, czarina, children, and servants were sent to Ekaterinburg, a town under the control of the most extreme Bolshevik soviet in the Ural Mountains.

  After that . . . silence.

  Rumor had intensified horror among the Russian émigré community, but now an official version, no less terrible, was emerging from investigators who had busied themselves taking depositions from those who could piece the story together.

  You don’t want to know, Esther thought. Humiliation first, that’s how it works; degrade the thing you want to kill so that you can kill it. It’s what was done to Jews.

  “If they’re dead, they’re dead,” she said. “Does it matter how?”

  Natalya was vehement. “Yes it does, thank you for asking. I don’t know what happened to your people, but what happened to mine bothers me.”

  “Was terrible for all of us,” Anna said unexpectedly. “I don’t want to hear. Too bad to remember.”

  “Then fuck off,” Natalya told her. She appealed to Esther. “Don’t any of the books say something about it?”

  There was one. A new one that had just been published in France— also by the imperial children’s tutor, Peter Gilliard: Le Tragique Destin de Nicolas II et de Sa Famille. Nick had brought it to Esther to translate. She had left it unopened. A pogrom was a pogrom, whether it slaughtered royalty or Jews; the same bullets smashed into flesh, the same bayonets caught the light as they slashed downward. And the aftermath was the same, bodies twitching on the ground, that sudden quiet into which a child whimpered and a dog barked before they were silenced.

  I will not read it. I’ve been there.

  But Natalya was becoming insistent. The once self-assured, perky stripper had become haunted by questions that, Esther knew, should not have been raised but which, now that they had, must be answered.

  She opened the book and began reading aloud.

  Of those who knew the whole story, not one had lived to tell it. Survivors who glimpsed the Romanovs in their last weeks gave vignettes scalded into their memories: soldiers lounging in the family’s room, pocketing souvenirs, insulting Alexandra, spitting on the servants.

  At Ekaterinburg railway station, Gilliard and some of the retinue were separated from their charges and got a last glimpse of the Romanov children as they were taken along the platform. Alexei, too ill to walk, was being carried in the arms of his attendant, Nagorny. Anastasia was carrying her little dog and struggling to pull along a suitcase too heavy for her. Alexei’s spaniel followed them.

  They were taken to a house that had belonged to a merchant named Ipatiev. It had been prepared for them.

  “The House of Special Purpose,” Anna said.

  Esther looked up from the book. “How do you know that?”

  “That’s what the Bolsheviks called it.”

  “Yes, they did.” She put the book aside. “I’m not reading any more.”

  But Natalya slammed the book back on her
lap. “You got to. It’s my ma and pa was there, not yours. What happened?”

  So Esther took them back to July 1918 in a house in the Urals that had been prepared for a special purpose.. . .

  On the night of the sixteenth, eleven people—all seven Romanovs, their doctor, and three servants—were woken up and taken down to a small basement room.

  Esther said wearily, “This account came from one of the guards. The czar was told he and the others were going to be moved because the White Army was approaching to rescue them. There were rumors that loyalists were organizing an escape.”

  “Why didn’t they, why the hell didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know. It was all a mess.”

  By the time the White Army arrived, the House of Special Purpose was empty, the walls of its basement room were pitted with bullet holes. Alexei’s spaniel, Joy, was whimpering outside.

  “Even then they couldn’t believe that the Reds had shot the children. Not the children.”

  Natalya urged time forward. “Who was with them when they were shot?”

  “Dr. Botkin and Kharatinov—”

  “He was the cook.”

  “Trupp, the footman, and Demidova.”

  “Demidova,” Natalya said softly. “Funny little thing.”

  “And Jemmy.” Anna’s voice was harsh. “Don’t forget Jemmy.”

  “Anastasia’s spaniel?” Natalya said. She was weeping. “I remember him as a puppy. He piddled in the Grand Salon. I had to wipe it up. What they kill him for?” She wiped her eyes. “What happened to the others?”

  Esther said, “Nagorny was taken away from Alexei. He was put in another prison, the same one as Countess Hendrikov and Mademoiselle Schneider and Prince Dolgoruky. Gilliard thinks they were all shot. Leonid Sednev—”

  “They didn’t shoot Leo, did they?” Natalya asked. “He was a kid, can’t have been more than fourteen. Worked in the kitchens.”

  “No, they let him go, but I can’t find out what happened to him.”

  The Whites put a trained legal investigator, Sokolov, on the search. Eventually, at the site of a mine several miles away from Ekaterinburg, he found evidence that bodies had been hacked to bits and then burned with acid. He’d reported back to Gilliard. The work had been hasty; hundreds of fragments belonging to the family—the czar’s belt buckle, one of the czarina’s earrings, Dr. Botkin’s false teeth—identi-fied them.

  “But the children...the children?” Gilliard had begged.

  “The children have suffered the same fate as their parents,” Sokolov told him. He convinced Gilliard by showing him an odd collection of coins and nails and bits of string he’d found among the detritus.

  Esther said steadily, “It was the stuff Alexei used to keep in his pockets.”

  For a while the sitting room was silent.

  “No mention of my ma and pa?”

  Esther shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  Natalya shouted, “What about that, then, Your Imperial Highness? How did you escape being shot and cut up? Fairies took you away, did they? Angels flew you off?”

  “I don’t know!” Anna shouted back. “I don’t know how. I faint. Everything is blue and noise. Everything . . . blood everywhere. I did not know days. I was mad, I think. The Tchaikovsky brothers rescue me.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t believe, but is true. Peasants. They say they hide me. Took me to Romania, I remember Bucharest—was terrible, terrible. Then they disappear, first Alexander Tchaikovsky, then Serge—the Bolsheviki kill them, I think, because they would not tell where I was. The Cheka looked for me to shoot me. I am alone, so alone.” She put her clenched hands up to her eyes and stood. “I don’t tell more. You do not believe. Nobody believe.”

  They heard the slam of her bedroom door.

  After a while Natalya said, “She’ll have to do better than that.” The stove sizzled as she spit on it. “Tchaikovsky brothers. Tchaikovsky, I ask you—I bet it’s the only Russian name she knows.” She began to cry. “Oh, Ma,” she said. “Oh, poor Pa. What did they do to you?”

  SINCE NICK BROUGHT most of their supplies and the milkman, baker, and coalman delivered the rest, there was no necessity for the three women to set foot outside the house. If Prince Nick had been given his way, they wouldn’t have. “I’m not having Nasha slipping off to gossip with her pals at the Parrot. You see she stays in.”

  “Damned if I do. I’m not a prison guard.” The autumn was glorious; Esther wasn’t going to let it go by without Natalya or herself breathing some of its air.

  “Okay, but she goes out, you go with her.”

  It suited them both: Natalya to get away from Anna, Esther to get away from the tension the other two women created when they were together. Anna didn’t want to come—“Cheka will see me.” She was equally scared to be left alone, and they had to ask Frau Schinkel if Anna could sit with her while they were out. It meant that the outings had to be restricted to the daytime, because Anna refused point-blank to be left, even in Frau Schinkel’s company, when darkness fell.

  Kurfürstendamm, the great street that had rivaled anything in the city center and had once been described as “the coffeehouse of Europe,” wasn’t the fun it had been. Due to inflation its shops, theaters, and cinemas were beginning to shut down. For a while the two women were able to order coffee in one or another of its cafés and eke it out for an hour or more while sitting at one of the pavement tables, but when the price of a cup became more than Esther earned in a week, that luxury was denied them and they took to walking instead.

  Then the weather changed. Rain and wind became incessant, umbrellas were blown inside out. They were forced to stay indoors, a situation that fed the nerves, especially Natalya’s; she would tense the moment Anna came into the room, eyes glinting sideways at her, waiting for a wrong move. And a wrong move was inevitable. Anna wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, judge the situation. She made the ill-considered remark, continually left the place in a mess.

  Esther found herself yelling at them to shut up—and realized she was more on edge than either of them. Next Saturday would be October 21.

  Stop it, she told herself. You are not going to live in fear, not again.

  Nevertheless, she reverted to panic when the telephone shrilled on Friday evening and she walked into the living room to find that Natalya had answered it and was talking to somebody. “Yeah, just the same,” Natalya was saying drearily. Seeing Esther, she said, “Got to go,” and hung the receiver back on the wall.

  “Who was that?” Esther demanded.

  “Friend of mine.”

  “You gave him this number?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? I’m not allowed to talk to a pal now?”

  “You gave him this number?”

  “Yes I did,” Natalya said, mouthing it. “Pal of mine at the Parrot. I was keeping in touch. I can do that, can’t I? Stuck in this fucking tomb? And I gave him the number, not the bloody address.”

  “I told you,” Esther said, “phone out by all means but nobody phones in.”

  “You think your guy can find us through a telephone number? What is he, psychic? You’re paranoid, you are.”

  She pushed past Esther. “I’m going to bed. Fuck-all else to do.”

  Esther was left in an empty room. He’s not my guy, she thought. He’s Anna’s, and Anna is my responsibility. I’ve got to be paranoid for her.

  Was she paranoid? Was she scaring herself with an entity that didn’t exist? Could you find out an address from a telephone number? Maybe not. But maybe.

  Stop it, she told herself. Just stop it. It’s being cooped up in this goddamned flat, it’s making us all paranoid one way or another.

  Nevertheless, she called Nick at the club to remind him to send Theo around on Saturday.

  He was irritated that she was holding him to it. The Hat was going to be busy on Saturday. The von Schwerin boys were bringing a large party; Theo would be needed.

  “Find another bouncer for the ni
ght,” she told him.

  “ ‘Oh, Nick, it’s the sixth weekend,’ ” he said, mimicking her. “ ‘Our friend’s been saving up his pfennigs for the train fare to come and knock Anna off.’ Sweetheart, I don’t like to tell you this, but the Cheka ain’t that poor.”

  “Neither are you,” she said. “Find another bouncer.”

  Natalya was as caustic as Nick, but by now Esther had the bit between her teeth. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “Maybe there’s nobody after Anna. But if I’m not ...well, believe me, you don’t want to meet him on the stairs.”

  Big Theo, a hat pulled over his eyes, was unloaded in Bismarckstrasse on Saturday morning, and Esther, watching out for him, saw that Nick had given him instructions to make sure he wasn’t followed. As he turned the corner and lumbered up the avenue, he paused to crouch behind every tree and peer around its trunk back to the way he’d come— about as conspicuous in Bismarck Allee as a hippopotamus.

  She explained his duties to him. “I just want you here as a watchman. I don’t want you hurt again. If somebody knocks on the street door, ask who it is before you open it. If he hears a man’s voice, he’ll probably run away.”

  “He the same fella stuck me at the Hat, he won’t do no running. I’m tearing his legs off.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Explaining Theo to Frau Schinkel wasn’t easy. “One of Fraulein Tchichagova’s admirers from her theater days has been trying to find her new address. He may be ...overenthusiastic, and we think it would be a good idea if only Herr Theo answers the front door for the next two days.”

  Esther’s more fevered imaginings involved a knife cutting Frau Schinkel’s capacious throat unless Anna was handed over.

  Frau Schinkel’s distrust of foreigners, modern young women, and theater people was confirmed. If renters hadn’t been hard to come by— her second floor was still empty—the girls in 29c would have been out in an instant.

  As it was, Theo charmed her. He carried coal, replaced a lightbulb too high for normal reach, and played choo-choo in the hall with Frau Schinkel’s grandchildren when her daughter visited on Saturday afternoon. He was even given supper and only returned, replete, to 29c and his bed on the living room sofa in the evening.