City of Shadows

  Apart from the family visit, the one time the front doorbell rang all day was when a parcel arrived for Frau Schinkel by the second post. Esther, hearing it and going to the kitchen window to check, called down to Theo to answer it, more for the look of the thing than because she really believed that Anna’s would-be assassin had dressed up as a postman.

  The night passed peaceably to the tune of Theo’s snoring.

  Sunday came and went without incident. “Told you,” Natalya said. When Nick turned up to fetch Theo on Monday morning, he said

  nothing so loudly that Esther told him to shut up. She felt like a fool. On the next sixth weekend, December 2 and 3, she didn’t bother

  with precautions. Nothing happened then either.

  ON AN EVENING toward the end of December, Nick arrived with a large suitcase as well as the usual supplies. “Here’s a cache to keep you ladies in style while I’m away. Don’t spend it all at once.” He opened the suitcase, revealing an interior stuffed with high-denomination German banknotes.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m taking Eloise away for Christimas. Boris is taking care of the clubs. Eloise hates the cold—she’s warm-blooded.” He rolled his eyes. “Boy, is she warm-blooded.”

  Finding that his reception lacked enthusiasm, he said, “And great news, Esther. Come the New Year, we’re going to launch the good ship Anastasia. I’ve heard from Aunt Grand Duchess Olga, got her interested. I reckon our girl’s ready now. Where’s Nasha?”

  “Out.”

  “I told you she wasn’t to go out nights. Where is she?”

  “She’s visiting a friend at the Parrot.”

  “Shit.”

  She let him rave. Natalya, too, had raved; her incarceration had begun to affect her to a point where Esther feared that if she were closeted with Anna much longer, there would be another murder.

  “And while we’re about it, Nick,” she said, “I have to tell you that the day you launch the good ship Anastasia is the day I leave you. I don’t approve. I never have.”

  He was quiet for a moment, walking around her. “You studied the secretarial job market lately, Esther?”

  “I don’t care.”

  He quoted a Russian proverb: “A dog is wiser than a woman. It doesn’t bark at its master.”

  “I still don’t care.”

  Now he was anxious. “You wouldn’t give her away, though, would you?”

  “She’ll give herself away.”

  “Want to bet?” He recovered his good humor. “We’ll see. You don’t go to Tula with your own samovar.” He was full of old Russian proverbs tonight—she’d never known what that one meant. He put his arm around her. “We’re still friends, ain’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course we are. Of course we are. You and me, we’ve come a long way together. Just keep our Anna safe till I get back. A couple of weeks, that’s all I’m asking. Can you do that?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Soon after he’d left, Natalya came home, screaming with rage. “Well, that’s done it! I can’t go back. I burned my bridges for that bitch, and now I’m stuck with her. I’ll kill Nick when I see him!”

  “What on earth’s the matter?”

  “I mean there isn’t a job for me anymore. The Parrot’s closing down. Oh, yes.” Esther had opened her mouth. “He’s keeping the Parasol and the Hat, but he’s closing the Parrot. Janni told me. Isn’t paying its way what with inflation or some goddam thing.” She tore off her hat and threw it across the room. “ ‘Double pay, Nasha. Help the grand duchess to her rightful position, Nasha. Make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Nasha.’ He never said, ‘If it don’t work, you’re on the street, Nasha.’ Sneaky, slippery, swindling bastard!”

  Esther agreed with her. Nick hadn’t mentioned his intention to close the Purple Parrot to her either. Naturally Natalya was panicking; Nick was taking away her safety net.

  She put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “There’s always a place for talent. There are other clubs.”

  “And I’ve been in ’em,” Natalya said. “Smoky little cellars where the customers put paper money in your spangles and stick their finger up your crotch while they’re doing it. The Parrot was respectable.”

  Probably why it’s closing, Esther thought. As the mark’s value went down, so did standards.

  “Well, I ain’t going back to that,” Natalya said, “I’m an artiste, and I’m going to be a movie star.” She shook herself free of Esther’s arm. “That cow better turn out to be Anastasia, because if she don’t, I’m applying for the job.”

  Esther was left alone, watching rain splatter against the windows. The year had been spent concocting a lie; it was as if time itself had become weary of it and broken down, exhausted, leaving them all trapped in a dimension that didn’t move.

  FOR SOMEONE WHOSE future was reliant on Anna—perhaps because it was reliant on Anna—Natalya was incapable of dealing patiently with her. Came the evening when Anna once more got up from the table without clearing it and, called back by Esther, refused. “Is not for me. Let her do it.”

  Natalya leaped with her hands out for Anna’s throat.

  Esther pulled both of them apart and did some raving of her own, ending with, “. . . and now get your coats on. We’re going out.”

  “She’s a shit madwoman,” Anna screamed, holding a bitten ear.

  “I’m a madwoman? Who ended up in Dalldorf?”

  “We’re going out,” Esther said, “or we’ll all end up in fucking Dalldorf.”

  “I do not go. Cheka will kill me.”

  “Let’s hope they do.”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Esther said. “It’s Christmas Eve in case you two Christians had forgotten, and we’re going out.”

  They forced Anna into her teddy-bear coat and pulled one of Na-talya’s cloche hats down over her ears. Her protests were automatic; in fact, she was not too unwilling. This would be the first time she’d been out for something like three years.

  With Anna walking arm in arm between them to guard her from Cheka bullets, they went forth into a Christmastide Berlin.

  Which was gaunt. The cold air was even more bitter than the ill-feeling they’d left behind. Nativity candles that should have been in every window sent out light from only a few. In Kurfürstendamm well-dressed men and women were being handed from their cars into the better restaurants and hotels, but the cafés that should have been packed with ordinary, celebrating Berliners were gone.

  It was the same in the Tiergarten. There was the usual municipal Christmas tree, but its decoration was subdued, and few people were listening to the carols played by an oompah band. Only the American embassy, which had guests arriving at its doors, showed signs of festivity.

  “What’s happening?” Anna asked.

  “Inflation’s happening,” Esther said. Nick, with his supplies and his money, had insulated them from a crisis so deep that Germany, which had invented the modern Christmas, could no longer afford it.

  The only color came from dozens of red posters surmounted by a huge black cross with horizontals on its end extending in the same counterclockwise direction. “What’s that?” Anna asked.

  “Tut, tut, Imperial Highness, you should know that,” Natalya said. “Your ma put them up all over the place.”

  “It’s a swastika,” Esther said. “It’s an Eastern symbol of light.”

  “Is nice,” said Anna.

  On their way back, they passed a flea-pit cinema advertising Nosferatu and the fact that its auditorium was heated. Anna and Natalya wanted to go in, Esther didn’t. “It’ll be depressing. It’s about a vampire.”

  Natalya, her teeth still tasting Anna’s ear, said, “Good, I’m thinking of taking it up.”

  They went in. At the box office, the manager pulled their tickets off a roll. “Four thousand marks, thank you,” he said.

  “What?” They stared at him. Frau Schink
el had complained with increasing panic at what was happening to prices, but this was ridiculous.

  “I could’ve bought a stinking car for that,” Natalya said incredulously.

  “Or coal,” the manager said hopefully. “I’ll let you in for a nugget of coal each. Got to keep the boiler going.”

  “Oh, what a shame,” said Esther. “We left the coal at home.”

  In the end he let them in, to increase his audience and on the understanding that next time they brought something negotiable. Esther offered him the thousand-mark note she had in her purse, which, she’d hoped, would buy them all a meal. He turned it down. “I already papered my living room,” he said.

  She’d been right; the film was scary. Anna and Natalya enjoyed it.

  They went to the cinema a lot after that—Nick had seen to it that the coal bunker in the backyard was replete, though Esther noticed that each time she went to fill up their hod, the heap was smaller than when she’d left it. She didn’t mention it to the others; even Frau Schinkel, she thought, didn’t deserve to die of cold.

  None of the films were new releases, and all were German, well made but very dark.

  “For Chrissake, show something lively, Ernst,” Natalya told the manager. “Give us a Hollywood movie.”

  “Sorry, girls, I can’t afford the distributors’ fee.”

  But the outings were a distraction—at least until the evening when they found the cinema closed.

  Nick didn’t return in two weeks, or three weeks, or four.

  Inflation saw to it that the money he’d provided on December 21 to keep them for three weeks had run out in two, even with careful management.

  “One thing,” Natalya said. “Any bugger breaks into this flat looking for food’s going to be disappointed.”

  Esther rang the Green Hat to ask for her wages, which hadn’t been forthcoming.

  Boris was harassed more than she’d ever known him to be. “Esther, it’s fucking chaos here. Nick left me without enough to pay all the fucking bills, half the staff are on strike, and if it wasn’t for American fucking playboys, I couldn’t pay the other half.”

  “I can’t pay the rent, Boris.”

  “Sorry, Esther.”

  It was an indication of how bad things were, he said, that the previous night a party of six Americans had feasted off oysters and champagne at the Green Hat on a single dollar. “And had change left over. And the fuckers tipped in marks.”

  “Where is he, Boris? I thought he was in Saint-Trop’.”

  “Wasn’t warm enough for his latest, apparently. They’ve fucked off somewhere in North Africa.”

  Without Nick and his protection, the three women were exposed to the catastrophe that had overtaken the world outside their walls, naked as babies on a hillside.

  Frau Schinkel refused to accept anything except currency for the rent. “What do I want with a coat?” They were offering Natalya’s second-best, she being the only one of them who possessed two. “Can I eat it? Can I stew it with dumplings?”

  “You can if you barter it,” Esther said. “I’ll do it for you. What do you need?”

  “Cash.” Frau Schinkel was too old and too respectable to barter; she refused to understand what was happening; she couldn’t believe that her widow’s pension had disappeared and that the war bonds she’d bought so patriotically in 1916 would never be paid back. Her suspicion that the apartment upstairs was Prince Nick’s harem, a seraglio of foreign women no better than they should be and at least one of them Jewish, tainted their articles of clothing for her.

  Esther, with great regret—she’d become interested in photography— went to the pawnbroker around the corner with a Leica camera Nick had given her for a birthday and hurried back with money to pay Frau Schinkel, who then hastened with it to the shops. In the time the procedure had taken, prices had gone up—a fact with which the landlady acquainted Esther on her return, ending her diatribe with, “That Herr Hitler has the right idea.”

  “Vindictive old bitch,” Natalya said. “Who is Herr Hitler?”

  “The man behind all the red posters,” Esther said. “He’s started a National Socialist Party down in Bavaria.”

  “What’s he stand for?”

  “It’s more what he stands against, I think. Capitalists, homosexuals, liberals, socialists, and Communists. Oh, and foreigners, especially Jews.”

  “Good for him,” Anna said.

  She quailed—for once Esther had turned on her. “You will never say that in my presence again. Never. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Esther.”

  They tried pawning everything that wasn’t vital, but most pawnshops had become overstocked and picky.

  Esther set up a stall in the road and stood shivering by it for half a day, eventually selling the loathsome hunting prints to a visiting Dane who gave her enough money to enable her to stand in a line for the rest of the day and buy two eggs, which she turned into an omelette for three.

  It was Natalya who suffered most. For one thing, it was her bits of costume jewelry that pawnbrokers accepted—the other two had none. For another, the price of cigarettes forced her to give up smoking.

  She became increasingly restive and irritable. She blamed Nick “and whatever trollop he’s gone off with.” She blamed Esther for bad housekeeping. “You’d think a bloody Jew could manage better.” And then was sorry. She blamed the czar for causing a revolution, she blamed the Bolsheviks for providing one, she blamed the German government for mishandling the economy, but most of all she blamed Anna Anderson, on whose altar, she’d come to believe, she had sacrificed her career. “I could’ve been in Hollywood by now if it wasn’t for that crackpot.”

  Surprisingly, Anna bore all the privations with an uncomplaining stoicism that indicated she’d endured worse. She was concentrating on her English lessons, thus leaving Natalya at loose ends, which, illogically, Natalya also resented.

  “When are we going to get our hands on all these jewels?” she demanded.

  “What jewels?” Esther asked. She was tired and hungry. “There aren’t any damn jewels.”

  “Yes there are.” Natalya had been reading yet another magazine article on the Romanovs. Like the barbarian Golden Horde of Tartars from whom they were descended, the czars had encrusted themselves and their relatives with precious stones. There were jewels with names: La Pelegrina pearl, the Orlov diamond, the Polar Star ruby. There were Marie Antoinette’s diamond earrings, Catherine the Great’s black pearls, diamonds with blood on them, rubies, sapphires set by Cartier, by Fabergé. “Says here the imperial collection was estimated at eighty million dollars.”

  “The Bolsheviks got them,” Esther said.

  “The czar would have cached some outside Russia—he wasn’t that much of a fool.” Natalya, dazzled, her eyes reflecting facets of a thousand gems, saw chests of them waiting to be collected as if from an unclaimed-luggage office.

  “And Anna’s got the bloody ticket,” she said. “We’ve given it to her. You and me. I want my share, and I want it soon. I can’t go on like this.”

  They were huddled around the stove that had been filled with the last of the coal. There’d been more electricity cuts, and Anna was writing out her English exercises by the light of a candle, a notepad on her knees.

  “I’m not going on with it either,” Esther said. It was time to say it; she should have said it before.

  Natalya looked up. “What’s that?”

  “I’m pulling out. All of us must pull out. We’re hurting too many people.”

  “Who’s it hurting? Her?” Natalya jerked a thumb at Anna. “She loves it.”

  “It’s hurting all of us, her especially. She’s sick, and we’re colluding with her sickness. I’m not doing it anymore.” She thought of the Romanov survivors and their wounds that the fraud would start rebleeding. If you lived with grief long enough, it became lodged so that you could go about your life somehow—she knew that, God, how she knew it—but to be reminded all over again
. . .

  So even if Anna Anderson had been the real Anastasia, could those who’d loved the grand duchess welcome a disruption to the accommodation they’d made with her death? Probably no more than a real Anastasia could fit herself to their lives—a woman in whom the intervening years inevitably wrought change of character and manners and experience of how the real world wagged and what wagged it.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Anna will never stand up to close inspection, not by those who really knew her. You know that.”

  “What are you talking?” Anna had heard her name.

  Natalya turned on her, using German like a slap. “Esther says you’re not going to be the grand duchess no more.”

  “Am the grand duchess.”

  “Then tell me that in Russian!” Natalya’s arms went up, and she was suddenly screaming. “Fuck it, I’m wasting my life here! I’ve wasted half a year of my life! Fuck it! Fuck it!” They watched her go to her room and slam the door, heard her stomping.

  Anna turned to Esther. “What she cry about?”

  “Anna, it stops now.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, I apologize, I’m sorry I was ever part of it. I shouldn’t have done it to you. It’s time to stop, little one. We’ve all been using you. It’s fraud, Anna. At least it isn’t now, but it will be. You’ll be claiming money under false pretenses, and that’s a serious crime. Even if there is a fortune in the Bank of England, you’re not going to get it.”

  “I don’t want the money.”

  It was as calm a statement as Esther had heard her make, and the truest. For a moment, sane eyes looked into hers. Quietly, Esther said, “What do you want?”

  The moment slipped away. “I am Grand Duchess Anastasia,” Anna said.

  “Listen to me. Think what your life will be like; the pretense will drive you insane. The Romanovs won’t accept you; they won’t want to. Be content with being ordinary. We’ll stay together, if you want us to. We’ll manage, I promise.”