City of Shadows

  Theo was chased from the ward, pursued by lustful catcalls from some of the beds, and Esther helped Anna into the dress she’d bought for her, the prettiest she’d been able to find in Kurfürstendamm’s newest and most expensive store. Overlarge hospital slippers went oddly with it—Esther hadn’t been able to guess Anna’s shoe size—but since the woman’s legs wobbled under the unaccustomed exercise of walking, they were just as well.

  They picnicked in a summerhouse in the asylum’s neat and scented rose garden. The huge figure of Big Theo on guard blocked light from the doorway, and the sun came through the slats in horizontal stripes to shine on the contents of a hamper that Nick’s chef had filled with delicacies fit for a Russian princess—caviar, blinis, pelmeni—“so’s your Imperial Highness can feel at home.”

  Anna looked at it with suspicion and, somewhat wisely in view of a stomach inured to hospital food, chose a chicken leg and nibbled at it cautiously with her canines.

  Sniffing a choice of champagne and “good old Russian kvass,” Anna—again wisely in the opinion of Esther, who’d always loathed kvass—agreed to sip a glass of champagne. Esther herself took the long-forgotten opportunity of wolfing down blinis stuffed with caviar and sour cream.

  Nick was tremendous—talking, laughing, painting the future, recalling happy Romanov state occasions of the past, trying to draw some royal memory or acknowledgment from his guest.

  Nothing. The great violet eyes studied him and Esther, and rested, perhaps with comfort, on Theo’s back, but the sunken mouth didn’t open.

  It was only when Nick had admitted defeat and he and Esther were packing the food away that a soft voice said, “Want a dog.”

  Nick actually looked around in case somebody else had slipped in through the summerhouse slats. “Sure, sure, Your Imperial Highness, you have all the dogs you want. You ready to leave with us? I got the car outside.”

  Her Imperial Highness wasn’t ready. “I go back in now,” she said.

  With Theo’s bulk covering them, they helped her back to the hospital.

  “You reckon we’re making progress, Esther?” Nick asked on the way home.

  “I don’t know. At some time or another, that girl was terrified by some man—raped, probably. She can’t get rid of the memory. It haunts her.”

  Enslavement to memory was something Esther knew about; freeing herself from her own was an everyday struggle. Sometimes she won, sometimes she didn’t.

  “Yeah, well I can’t spend all my time in a loony bin. I got a business to run. What the grand duchess needs is sessions on her own with a nice lady companion like she was used to, discuss Old Russia, improve her German, girly talk, win her confidence—all that stuff.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  Esther sighed, but he was probably right; with her distrust of men, Anna’s rehabilitation was more likely to be achieved by a woman. “Am I going to be paid extra for this?”

  “For spending afternoons chatting? You want extra?”

  She was at least allowed the use of his car and, with Theo beside her, drove it every afternoon to Dalldorf, returning them both to the club in the evening, where she caught up on her typing and translation, not forgetting to point out that doing so kept her working into the early hours.

  Anna was content to leave her bed as long as Theo was by her side and they didn’t venture too far from the main building. Even then her eyes were never still, always aware and looking for movement. A rustle made by quarreling birds in the bushes could make her curl up like a hedgehog.

  The sun continued to shine, it was nice for Esther to get out of an airless office to sit in the asylum’s immaculate gardens—and the sessions with the unknown woman were compelling.

  For one thing, she had no curiosity. Esther’s attempts to fill in for her the years that had been spent in a hospital ward were useless. The revolution that had made Germany into a unified, if shaky, democracy, the reparations demanded by the victors of the Great War that were bleeding it dry—these things were met with complete lack of interest.

  The latest fashions evinced a flicker of response, but it soon went out. She seemed to have taken Prince Nick at face value as someone who’d come into her life with the intention of helping her, but she was incurious as to why.

  “What do you want to talk about?” Esther asked desperately.

  “Russia.”

  “The revolution?”

  “No. Was bad. Old Russia. Romanovs, tell me about Romanovs.”

  Even then she showed more interest in the magazine articles Esther brought her on the subject than in Esther’s stilted attempts to describe royal state occasions.

  Her German was ungrammatical and she spoke it with an accent Esther couldn’t identify. Any inquiries about her past—how she’d come to jump into the canal and why—were met with silence, and the day Esther persisted with them ended in Anna’s demand that she be

  taken back to her ward.

  Esther watched her go.

  Who the hell are you? What are you afraid of?

  The questions remained unanswered. The only subject on which Anna would hold forth was her nurses and fellow inmates, all of whom, except Clara, displeased her. “They don’ show me respect.”

  Respect. It was her only yardstick. She approved of Theo because he treated her like royalty; indeed, she spent a lot of the sessions ordering him around. “Go pick me flowers.” “Fetch me a handkerchief.” And smiled, always behind her hand, as he obeyed.

  Esther failed the test by refusing to call her “Your Imperial Highness” when demanded. “No,” Esther said, “I’m calling you Anna, or your real name if you tell me what it is, but I’m not using titles.”

  There was an immediate flash of temper. “Solomonova. Esther Solomonova. Clara says is Jewish name.”

  “It is.”

  Anna got up to go. “Don’t like Jews.”

  “You’re stuck with me, kid,” Esther said calmly. “There isn’t anybody else.”

  Anna looked toward the hospital for a long moment and then sat down again.

  It was, Esther felt, a small triumph, an admission that Anna needed her. It didn’t stop the gibes, though. As the young woman gained confidence in defining herself as one of the Romanovs, she was consistent in displaying their anti-Semitism.

  It came up again and again as Esther tried to fit her for social life in the outside world: “It’s better to use your fork. Like this.” When they were alone over the picnic basket, Anna felt free to attack the beautiful food with ferocity.

  She snarled at Esther, “What a Jew know? When you been hungry like me, you eat any way you can.”

  “Maybe, but ladies don’t.”

  So she’d been hungry. Esther’s impulse to slap her was invariably overtaken by compassion; whoever Anna Anderson was, she was vulnerable.

  Even when it was with gritted teeth, Esther always reminded herself that the girl had tried to drown herself.

  “She ready to come out yet?” Nick was growing impatient, afraid that some other entrepreneur might discover the golden goose at Dalldorf.

  “Not yet.”

  And then, suddenly, she was.

  IT WAS A Saturday night when the Green Hat, though busy, was not expecting any celebrated guests, and Nick had gone across to the Adlon to dine, wine, and bed his latest paramour, a silent-film star, leaving Boris, his manager, in charge.

  The call went through to Nick’s office, where Esther was working late.

  Over what sounded like a bad day on the Somme, Dalldorf ’s ma-tron’s voice was pitched at an unmatronly level. “Prince Nick said he would assume responsibility for Unbekkant. Come now. We can’t put up with this.”

  “I’m on my way.” Esther put through a call to the Adlon, where the desk clerk told her that Nick and his lady had just walked out of the hotel for a destination unknown. Damn it, damn it. She left a message for him, snatched his spare set of car keys from his drawer, and went downstairs.

  “Boris
, if Nick comes back, tell him I’ve gone to Dalldorf. I’m taking his car. And I’m going to have to borrow Theo for an hour or so.”

  “Okay, Esther, but bring him back quick—the von Schwerin boys just came in unexpected.” German minor royalty spent freely but never felt it was having a good time unless it smashed furniture.

  It was a warm night, and despite her concern for Anna, Esther enjoyed the drive—she loved the power of the Audi.

  If Dalldorf had sounded like a battleground when the matron phoned, it now resembled a retreat before a vengeful army. Light spilled from its doors and windows, showing ghostly, night-clad inmates dodging around the grounds chased by doctors and nurses.

  A naked woman—Esther thought it might be Clara Peuthert—was outlined against the moon as she sat on the roof ridge, diligently chucking tiles onto the terrace below.

  Inside the hall two male nurses were fighting to put a straitjacket on a man twice their size, stepping as they did so in a pool of ink, which the splatters suggested had been thrown with force from the top of the stairs. The noise coming from all over the building was zoo-like: howls, screeches, whoops, combined with the crash of glass. Somewhere upstairs a battering ram was being employed.

  The matron stood like a rock at her desk, telephone in one hand, the other clutching the pajama neck of a crying, wriggling, adolescent boy.

  “Where is she?” Esther asked.

  “Locked herself in a lavatory. They’re trying to break down the door.”

  “What happened?”

  “She thinks she saw a face at the window....My man, if you’d give a hand over there.” This was addressed to Theo with a nod toward the two nurses who were now hanging on to the straitjacket’s ties and being dragged through the ink. “Nonsense, of course, but she went howling around the hospital, setting off one ward after another and— Thank you, my man. Take him back to his bed. The nurse will show you.”

  With the shouting, kicking patient slung over one shoulder, Theo went off.

  As other captives were brought in, the matron saw that they were disposed of while simultaneously speaking to her superintendent over the phone, ordering the gardener to fetch a ladder and a maid to wipe up the ink, all in a calm but carrying voice and without letting go of the wriggling, whimpering boy.

  A crash indicated that the battering ram had done its job. Some minutes later Anna Anderson, hanging limp between a nurse and a man with a doctor’s coat over his pajamas, was brought downstairs. Her nightdress was stained, her feet trailed, and her eyes darted this way and that like a trapped animal’s, then fixed on Esther’s. “He find me,” she said. Her voice was raw with screaming and sounded inhuman.

  “I have tranquilized her,” the doctor said.

  The matron nodded. “Good-bye, Frau Unbekkant,” she said flatly.

  “But, but . . .” All at once Esther felt the weight of this new responsibility. “What do I do for her?”

  “She’ll fall asleep soon and will be out for some hours.”

  “Hasn’t she any luggage?”

  “Such as there is will be sent after her.”

  “But if she, well . . . Should she need more treatment, can I bring her back?”

  The matron looked around her devastated hall. “No,” she said.

  As Theo tucked Anna into the space behind the car’s two seats, there was a shout. “Remember it was me!” Clara Peuthert was gesticulating from the roof. “Remember me, Your Highness, I found you!”

  One of the nurses helping the gardener with the ladder gestured for Esther to go; by staying she was making things worse.

  She drove off.

  “That matron,” Theo said with admiration, “they make her a general and Germany win the war.”

  “Maybe, but don’t tell me a little thing like Anna could cause all that.” Esther was angry. “Two years, Theo, two years and no good-bye, not even a toothbrush.”

  “She tiny, maybe, but she damn trouble.”

  She still was. After a mile she began emitting hoarse, shuddering yelps. “He come after me, he’s coming, he’ll get me!”

  “Where?”

  “There. In the car. He’s coming!”

  “See anything, Theo?” They’d just rounded a curve.

  “No.” He was half turned in his seat beside her, holding on to Anna, who was trying to jump out.

  “There’s nothing, Anna. No car. Don’t be frightened. You’re safe now.”

  “No, no, he’s coming!”

  She kept it up for another mile, until the screams became shuddering little shrieks, then moans, and finally silence.

  Esther put her foot down, mentally wrestling with the difficulty of where to lodge Anna. Nick had been handling the matter of Anna’s apartment, but he hadn’t told Esther where it was, nor, she knew, had he yet agreed to the lease; he was quibbling over the rent.

  Where to take her? A hotel? Esther didn’t have enough money on her. She thought of her own tiny room at Rabbi Smoleskin’s house in Moabit, then rejected it. For one thing, she wasn’t going to subject the Smoleskin family to Anna’s anti-Semitism.

  “Theo, does anybody else at the Hat know what Nick’s up to with Anna?”

  There was the inevitable pause that Theo accorded to every question. “Nick say keep my mouth shut, just say he being kind to another poor Russian.”

  Kind, she reflected, but it was a relief. There would be no questions if she took just another poverty-stricken émigré back to the club for the rest of the night. That’s what she’d do, then. Nick could deal with the problem in the morning.

  THE MOON WAS high now. The dry spring had turned the surface of the roads to dust, so that the Audi’s speed churned up a cloud of it, leaving it hanging in the moonlit air like a trail of smoke.

  At the Green Hat, she parked behind a line of limousines collecting the last of the guests, some of whom were unsteady and having to be helped into their cars by their chauffeurs.

  Theo lifted Anna out of the backseat. They supported her into the foyer. Beyond, in the vast club room, the band was packing away its instruments and waiters were clearing the tables.

  From the cloakroom came the voice of Olga Ratzel pestering weary hatcheck and cigarette girls out of their uniforms and into their civvies—the elaborate Russian costumes and kokoshniks had cost Nick good money; none of the girls were allowed to take them home.

  Theo gathered Anna into his arms and followed Esther up the sweeping staircase with its heavily curlicued banister, relic of one of the kaiser’s palaces and another item Nick had bought to impress the customers. The newel posts were turbaned Negro boys carrying torches.

  Boris was in Nick’s office, counting the night’s takings. “What the hell you got there, Esther?”

  “A package for Nick. Is he back yet?”

  He wasn’t.

  Theo lowered the inert form of Anna onto the chesterfield; her eyes were slightly open; every now and then, she shuddered.

  “We’re going to have to spend the rest of the night here, Boris. I don’t know what else to do with her.”

  “Okay.” Boris was too tired to be curious—anyway, life with Prince Nick had taught him not to be. “You want I should leave Theo with you?”

  “Oh, God, yes please.” She’d need him if Anna became hysterical again.

  She went downstairs and crossed the floor of the now empty club to the kitchens to gather provisions—water, milk, a bottle of brandy for medicinal purposes, some sandwiches, beer for Theo.

  Boris had put the lights out before she got back so that the only illumination came from the chandeliers in the foyer, and she nearly tripped over a couple of broken gilt chairs lying witness to the von Schwerin brothers’ good time.

  Like all places built for a crowd, the club became eerie when it was empty. In the gloom Kandinsky’s walls gained the depth of a tangled forest from which Nick’s bears emerged, as if curious, to watch her pass by.

  “Esther.”

  She jumped. “Don’t do that.” r />
  Olga Ratzel, a thin, starched figure, was standing in the shadow of the doorway. They were old enemies.

  Briskly, Olga asked, “Who is that woman upstairs, please?”

  “She’s a friend of Nick’s, Olga. She’s homeless at the moment. We’re going to spend the night here.”

  “Spend the night? Does Nick know about this?”

  “Not yet he doesn’t. Excuse me.”

  Olga held her ground. “I need to know the circumstances, Esther. I am responsible for this club in Nick’s absence. Should the Vice Squad do one of its inspections and find some street woman—”

  “Just get out of my way, Olga.” Esther sidestepped, concentrating on the tray she carried, and crossed the foyer. The last of the staff to go had left the glass front doors open so that warm night air came in to dissipate the accumulated smell of expensive cigars and perfume and alcohol.

  Olga followed her upstairs, still lecturing. “Young woman, I arrange accommodation for the girls. If this female is homeless, I will find her a place right away, not here.. . . Camping out in Nick’s office, it is not suitable. ...Where we keep the receipts. ...A stranger . . .”

  Esther ignored her. Olga’s responsibility for everything was self-imposed. The Russian-born widow of a Berliner, she’d inveigled herself into the Green Hat very early on under Nick’s regime as a seamstress, laundress, and mender of uniforms. She’d made herself useful acting as dresser for such artistes as appeared on its stage, and gradually, without anyone’s knowing how, she’d extended her empire to take in the cloakroom, waiters, cigarette girls, and cleaners. Nick, recognizing an efficiency, more Germanic than Russian, that kept everyday problems off his shoulders, had allowed her a certain autonomy in hiring and firing of nonmanagerial staff—a latitude that enabled her to rule by terror.

  When Esther had arrived at the Green Hat, she’d put Olga’s hostility down to anti-Semitism, only realizing later that the woman resented as a rival any female whose position took her closer to the management of the club than her own—which Esther’s did.

  Olga went with her into the office, tightening her lips at the sight of Anna slumped and unconscious on the sofa. “Is she drunk?”