She stopped. This email was all wrong. She didn’t feel angry with Tom any more. It felt as though there had to be some kind of reprimand in her first communication, but not like this. When she thought about seeing him, she knew she would want to run straight into his arms. She was dying to sit down and chat to him, properly chat like they used to do in the old days. There was so much to tell him. But where should she start? She saved the email into her drafts folder and decided to return to it later, perhaps on the way back from the shops.
At the supermarket she picked up another crate of Chardonnay. The check-out girl didn’t comment any more, just scanned it through with tight lips. On the drive home, the white wine was calling out to Kitty: she needed a dose of liquid anaesthetic, so she drove straight to the cabin, took her shopping indoors and opened the bottle. She felt better already when she heard the glug-glug sound of the golden liquid swirling around her favourite glass. Over the lake, the sunset seemed more vivid than ever, like some kind of exaggerated hyper-reality. She sat on the jetty to watch, listening to the birds and frogs winding down like clockwork toys with the fading of the light. She felt entirely present in the moment, but somehow it was as though she was a visitor in someone else’s life – Dmitri’s maybe – rather than a protagonist in her own.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Berlin, 1930
One day Rosa brought home a women’s magazine called Das Blatt der Hausfrau with an article about the many people scattered around Europe who claimed to be missing Romanovs. There were dozens of them now, but the magazine profiled the main contenders, with photographs of several. Dmitri had heard that there were such folk but none of their stories had sounded convincing enough for him to pursue. Now that Rosa opened the magazine in front of him, with a quizzical look, he stopped to look, pausing over the German text.
? Michelle Anches, who claimed to be Tatiana, was said to have escaped Russia via Siberia in 1925 and arrived in Paris, where she took a small apartment. After she wrote to Tsar Nicholas’s mother in Denmark, saying that she was preparing to come and visit, she was shot dead in her apartment, friends blaming the Bolshevik secret police. Dmitri did not doubt that the Cheka had killed her, but looking at the photograph she was plainly not Tatiana: the face was broader, the chin more pointed, the eyes not so intelligent.
? Marga Boodts claimed that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany himself had recognised her as Olga when she arrived in that country after a long journey through eastern Russia and China. She gave interviews to many journalists about the brave Red Guardsman who rescued her from the Ipatiev House, but the story was laughable since she did not even slightly resemble Olga.
? Nadezhda Vasilyeva had been arrested in 1920 trying to escape from Siberia into China and was now being held in an insane asylum in the USSR, from which she wrote regular letters to monarchs around Europe proclaiming herself to be Anastasia. She had an angular face and looked much older than Anastasia would have been, so Dmitri moved on.
? Eugene Nikolaievich Ivanoff, who lived with a parish priest in Poland, claimed to be Alexei and explained that an old Cossack had helped him escape from Russia. Dmitri paused over this story because the photograph did look similar to Alexei and it seemed he suffered from haemophilia, unlike most other Alexei claimants. Could it be? Should he travel to Poland to meet him? He couldn’t help thinking it would be a wasted journey. Somehow the story didn’t quite add up.
The article made Dmitri wonder what Tatiana could do to make herself known if she ever managed to find her way out of Russia. She would most likely go to one of her relatives but what if they failed to recognise her, or weren’t sure? She wouldn’t know where to look for him but he was certain that twelve years on he would recognise her in an instant. She would be thirty-three years old now; she might have wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and perhaps her hair would have streaks of grey. Would her slender figure have thickened? No matter; he would know her anywhere.
Thinking about her brought on a weight of sadness and he turned to stare out the window. Rosa brought a cup of coffee and sat beside him, her hand on his arm.
‘Why do people pretend to be Romanovs?’ she asked. ‘Does it make them feel important? Do they hope one day to sit on the throne of Russia?’
Dmitri shrugged. ‘There is talk that Tsar Nicholas kept vast amounts of money in overseas banks and a successful claimant could access those funds. There are many reasons to try, but in truth they all seem poor creatures who struggle with their sanity.’
Rosa squeezed his leg. ‘It must be hard for you … But I brought the magazine because I thought you might like to see … Did I do the right thing?’
‘It’s fine.’ He shook his head as if to dispel the memory.
Nicholas and Marta were sitting on the floor playing at being shopkeepers. Nicholas put a single potato into Marta’s basket and said, ‘That will be twenty marks and I’m not giving you any more because you don’t even like potatoes.’
Marta handed back the potato saying, ‘It is too expensive. I think I will shop elsewhere today.’
Dmitri and Rosa laughed, but it was a sensitive point. The German economy was once again in trouble; the Great Depression that hit America the previous year had caused mass unemployment and business failures around the globe. Every street corner in Berlin had a woman in rags begging for a pfennig or two to feed her children. Men got up at dawn to queue for poorly paid labouring jobs. Dmitri still earned just enough from his articles for Rul plus royalties on his books to pay for their food and cover the rent but there was no surplus and he knew Rosa haggled with the best of them when she shopped for food. All the same, it was bittersweet to hear their four-year-old daughter doing the same.
For someone who worked as a journalist, Dmitri mused, he had twice failed to spot emerging political apocalypse until it became unmissable. In Russia, he had been aware of the grumblings against the monarchy and knew that revolution was in the air, but the November coup led by Lenin and Trotsky had seemed to him to emerge from nowhere. Similarly in Berlin, he was aware that men in brown shirts, known as the Sturmabteilung, were stirring up street brawls, and that they attacked anyone who did not support a minor fringe party known as the National Socialists, but he was astonished when that same minority party won eighteen per cent of the vote in the 1930 elections.
Burtsev asked him to write an article for Rul about the National Socialists’ claim that Communism was part of an international Jewish conspiracy, and Dmitri had no trouble at all in rubbishing that notion. In Russia the grass roots Bolshevik movement had gained strength from the disgruntled poor of all religions. Trotsky might have been Jewish but Lenin and the new leader, Stalin, were not. Who was supposed to be organising this Jewish conspiracy? None of it made sense, and he was scathing in his critique.
Rosa was worried when she read his article. ‘Perhaps it would be better not to draw attention to ourselves. It leaves you open to accusations of bias since I am Jewish.’
Dmitri had never given a thought to Rosa’s religion because she did not practise, and their children were not being raised in any particular faith. He had long since decided that organised religion was an absurdity and she agreed with him.
‘I can’t temper my journalistic opinions because of our personal circumstances,’ he replied. ‘Someone needs to stand up and point out the dangers of this new creed.’
Rosa was worried though. ‘Adolf Hitler is rapidly gaining supporters because he is restoring German pride. He needs scapegoats to blame for the economic ills and Jews and Communists are easy targets.’
‘That’s ridiculous! He looks Jewish himself! There might be a few unscrupulous Jewish moneylenders, but he can’t blame an entire race.’