Dmitri soon realised how short-sighted he was being as the political landscape mutated rapidly and street fights turned some districts of Berlin into battle zones. Brown-shirted Sturmabteilung and the so-called Hitler Youth, young boys in leiderhosen spouting the party message on purity of race, were suddenly everywhere. The neighbours’ sons, who had previously seemed nice young men, mutated into snarling bullies full of hatred.
Dmitri did not realise that Rosa had become a target of this vitriol until their son Nicholas asked him over dinner one evening: ‘Papa, what is a hure?’
Rosa tutted and tried to hush him, her face flushing.
‘Where did you hear that word?’ Dmitri demanded.
‘Mama said it to Mrs Brandt.’
Rosa shook her head, and motioned to Dmitri that she would tell him about it later, before saying, ‘Mama was wrong to use that word and you must forget about it and never repeat it.’
Later she told Dmitri that Mrs Brandt had spat in her face and called her a ‘filthy Jew’ as she walked home from the butcher’s holding the children by the hands. ‘I lost my temper,’ she said, ‘and yelled “At least my mother wasn’t a hure.” And then I remembered the children and their big ears.’
‘How does she know you are Jewish?’ Dmitri asked. Rosa used his surname, Yakovlevich, and her dark looks were more Southern European than Jewish.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. People talk. My sister has lost her job and she is sure it’s because she is Jewish, although her employer didn’t say as much.’
‘You must tell me if it happens again,’ Dmitri insisted. ‘I will not stand for this.’ The thought of Rosa being subjected to such treatment was painful to him. She was a good person who never harmed a soul; on the contrary, she went out of her way to help others. She collected shopping for an elderly neighbour who could no longer walk, and she often looked after a friend’s children so she could work, going to her apartment so as not to disturb Dmitri.
But one Sunday afternoon when Dmitri took the family to the zoo, he became intensely aware of whispering and pointing in their direction. Rosa ignored it, and the children were only interested in seeing Sammy, the giant sea elephant, at feeding time. As the day went on Dmitri’s temper became increasingly frayed so when a man approached and said to Rosa, ‘Your sort shouldn’t be allowed in here’, Dmitri pulled back his fist and punched him hard in the face. There was a cracking sound and blood spurted. The children began to cry, and he knew he should not have done it, but at the same time he was glad to take action, proud that at the age of almost forty he could still produce a punch like that.
Rosa bustled them away before there were any repercussions. ‘It doesn’t help,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve found it’s best to ignore them.’
But Dmitri couldn’t ignore this new movement that had turned his peace-loving girlfriend into a social pariah. It made him sick to his stomach and he decided to take a writer’s revenge, by writing a novel about it. Ostensibly it would be about the rise of Bolshevism within one particular village in Russia, and the way it affected ordinary villagers who had previously lived together in harmony – but actually it was about what was happening on the German national stage. As he wrote, the ideas flowed and he could feel in his fingertips that this was going to be the most important book he would ever write. He wanted it to have a mythical quality but at the same time show readers the lunacies of a system that favours one racial group above another.
His novel was published in February 1933, just two weeks after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, with the title The Boot that Kicked, an obvious allusion to the jackboots worn by the Sturmabteilung. Several newspapers interviewed Dmitri and publicly he always maintained that it was about the rise of Bolshevism in Russia rather than Nazism in Germany, but he added that if people wished to draw parallels, that was their prerogative.
Almost overnight, the level of harassment Rosa experienced in their street increased until she was afraid to go out of doors. She sent Dmitri to buy food and if she took the children out for some fresh air in the park, Dmitri had to accompany them. He wasn’t a particularly tall man but he had learned how to handle himself during his imperial guard training. In response to taunts, he squared up and stared the perpetrator directly in the eye in a way that left no doubt he was ready for a fight, and they invariably backed down.
‘We can’t live like this. Perhaps we should go to stay near my mother in the country,’ Rosa suggested.
‘It will happen in the countryside as well,’ Dmitri argued gloomily. ‘Mein Führer is encouraging anti-Semitism and everyone wants to curry favour.’
One evening, they returned from a day out to find the front door of their apartment smashed in. They looked inside to see a chaos of destruction. Pages had been ripped from Dmitri’s books and scattered like dead leaves on the floor. Clothes were strewn around and a bag of flour had been emptied over them. Limbs had been torn from Nicholas’s toy animals and Marta’s dolls. Dmitri’s typewriter had been smashed to pieces and his reporter’s notebook stolen. Cups and plates were broken, furniture overturned. Dmitri rushed to the bedroom and was relieved to find that they had not opened the brown leather suitcase in which he kept Tatiana’s diary. He couldn’t bear anything to happen to that.
When he returned to the front room, the children were in tears and Rosa had sunk to her knees to comfort them.
‘Who did this?’ Marta lisped through her tears, and Rosa hugged her before replying, ‘Bad people.’ Nicholas’s lip trembled. Dmitri looked at the three of them huddled together in the midst of the carnage and felt a wave of primal emotion. He couldn’t bear for his family to be upset, couldn’t stand them being hurt. And he realised that, although he still clung to the memory of the exquisite love he had experienced with Tatiana, this feeling was just as true a kind of love. He would lay down his life to protect these three souls.
The atmosphere in Berlin, of whispering and bullying, mistrust and betrayal, reminded him powerfully of St Petersburg in 1917. Back then he had been too slow to react. If he had arranged to have the Romanovs rescued when they were under house arrest in St Petersburg, just a few hundred miles from the safety of Denmark, they would be alive today. Instead he had hesitated, with tragic consequences. This time he was determined he wouldn’t delay.
Later, when the children were asleep, he said to Rosa, ‘We have to leave Germany until this madness is over.’
She looked sad: ‘But where would we go? This is our home.’
‘We both speak good English, so it makes sense to go to an English-speaking country. I won’t go to Britain because I can’t forgive them for abandoning the Romanovs. How about America?’
Rosa was astounded. ‘It’s so far! When would I see my family? My mother and sister?’
Frankly, Dmitri didn’t much care if he never saw her mother and sister again but he offered, ‘They could come too, if you like.’
‘Would America accept us? How do you go about applying?’
‘I’ll ask at the consulate tomorrow. I can’t have my family subjected to this.’ He took her face in his hands. ‘There’s something I’ve never said to you before, Rosa. I want you to know that I do love you. You and the children mean the world to me.’
She gasped, and the joy that shone from her eyes made him feel guilty that he had never said it before. They had been lovers for eleven years, had created two children together, and he had made her wait all this time to hear the words she yearned for. He didn’t deserve a woman as patient and good as her – but he was determined somehow to become worthy of her love.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Lake Akanabee, New York State, 4th October 2016