The Pretender Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Morrissy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  The Pretender

  Note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Berlin 1920. A young woman throws herself from a bridge into the Landwehr Canal, intent on suicide. But she is saved. She does not speak and refuses to give any clue to her identity. She is literally a nobody. After two years of silence, she claims to be Anastasia, the fourth daughter of the Tsar or Russia. For over sixty years she lives with the firm conviction that she is, indeed, a grand duchess. It is only after her death in 1984 that DNA tests establish that the women could not have been a Romanov. Who, then, was this mysterious woman, who lived a lie and convinced so many others of her fictional identity? And what of her own identity that she drowned that winter's night in Berlin?

  In The Pretender, Mary Morrissy writes the prequel to the Anastasia myth. She creates a fictional history for Franziska Schanzkowska, the Polish factory worker who so successfully fanned the mantle of the doomed princess. From the few facts that are known, Morrissy fashions the biography of a nobody – an impoverished Polish childhood, an adolescence set against the First World War and the ruinous humiliation of Germany in defeat, a young adulthood blighted by violence, trauma and loss.

  About the Author

  Mary Morrissy was born in Dublin in 1957. She has published a collection of stories, A Lazy Eye (1993), and a novel, Mother of Pearl (1996). She won the Hennessy Award in 1984 and a Lannan Literary Award in 1995.

  ALSO BY MARY MORRISSY

  A Lazy Eye

  Mother of Pearl

  For Sinéad, sibling without rival

  Didn’t you once glimpse what seemed your own

  inner blazonry in the monarchs, veering

  and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?

  Galway Kinnell, ‘Why Regret’

  Charlottesville, Virginia, 1978

  ‘EGGS,’ SHE CRIES, ‘eggs!’

  Jack Manahan stands in the summery doorway, a fat man framed in a lozenge of ferny green light. The voice from inside the purblind house is his wife’s. Slowly he steps inside, his bulk eclipsing the sun-bleached portal. The faint shiver of leaves on University Circle and the throbbing purr of an idling car engine are the only other sounds to counter the lazy tick of the high summer afternoon until Anastasia’s shrill command.

  ‘Eggs!’

  Jack picks through the debris of the living room, an obstacle course he has learned to navigate carefully. Dreg-tided cups, plates with pools of congealed food, the sour tang of cat piss. There are cats everywhere. Gingers, toms, tabbies, strays all. As he moves towards Anastasia (she is always in the same spot, sunk in a crestfallen yellow armchair near the ivy-shaded window), there is an angry hiss as he treads on Pushkin’s tail. Not that he knows the cats by name; in latter years they are all called Pushkin. Their revenge for such anonymity, or so Jack thinks, is to leave their individual claw marks on the furniture. The door jambs are scored so deeply they would feel like the bark of a tree to a blind man. Anastasia loves the cats but is exasperated by them. When they rub up against her legs she swats them away, yet the house has been completely abdicated to them.

  ‘Coming, my dear,’ Jack calls out to her as he rummages among the books piled in waist-high, teetering towers. She has of late grown terribly deaf, so even his reassurances have taken on the air of barked caricature. He riffles through the piles of newspapers which lie in a grimy tide at ankle level, then turns to their companions stacked around the room, giving the walls the texture of mille-feuille.

  Years of Anastasia’s imperious shorthand have taught him to anticipate her every whim rather than suffer hours of her cranky displeasure. Most of the time he gets it right. Just now she is thinking of the egg book. An illustrated catalogue of the extant collection of ornamental eggs made for the Russian imperial family by the master jeweller, Fabergé. Fashioned intricately in gold and enamel (some no more than three inches high), each egg contained a surprise, sometimes a singing bird or a music box. The Imperial Trans-Siberian Railway Egg, for example, contained a foot-long model of the royal train, featuring seven carriages made of platinum and gold which ran when wound up with a golden key. The First Imperial Egg is Anastasia’s favourite. Perhaps because it was the first. (Jack finds the Imperial Cross of St George Egg more poignant. Dating from 1916, the final one of the series, it features a portrait of the Tsarevich Alexei on its pale green, opalescent surface. Oh doomed child, Jack thinks.) Of all Fabergé’s Easter gift creations, the First Imperial was the plainest and the one that most resembled a real egg, being not much larger than life size and finished in unadorned white enamel. Inside, the shell was coated in gold and housed a golden yolk. The yolk opened to reveal a tiny ruby-eyed hen sitting on a nest of golden straw. The hen was also hinged and could be opened. It was said to contain a replica of the imperial crown, but like so much else this surprise, Jack notes sorrowfully, has been lost.

  The book is often produced when there are guests. It pacifies Anastasia and if she is being difficult it provides a welcome diversion. When he bought it, Jack hoped the book would act as an aide-mémoire for Anastasia, evoking the long dormant memories of her early, happy years at the Winter Palace. The scenes of his own childhood are so close at hand. This house, the farm in Scottsville, the leafy campus where his father was the dean, these landmarks remain. As do his father’s stern landscapes in oil, though now they are eclipsed behind towers of books, while his mother’s china figurines are swamped by Anastasia’s idiosyncratic memorabilia. (In Anastasia’s scheme of things a doughnut carton has as much value as an icon of the Madonna; nothing, absolut nichts, must be thrown away.) But Jack feels acutely the loss of Anastasia’s childhood trappings. There has been too much upheaval for anything to remain intact; in this way he tries to explain away her fractured memories to people who call at the house. Too many calamities have intervened; too much dirt, as she says herself. And while Anastasia had been awed and fascinated by the book and the demented opulence, the magnificent craftiness of the eggs, there had been no rush of sentimental memory. She had merely pored silently over the colour plates like a forensic child.

  ‘Eggs,’ she hollers again, beating the arm of the chair with her hand and eyeing him crossly.

  He searches among the papers lapping at her feet. She is shod in a pair of his carpet slippers, which are ridiculously big for her crooked feet. She wears a battered straw hat, a plum-red winter coat over several layers of ill-assorted clothes – there is a grey, pinstriped waistcoat from a suit of Jack’s which no longer fits him over a floral print summer dress. Underneath is a brown, cowl-necked sweater and unseen beneath that are a number of vests and slips. She dresses as if she is still on the run. And in a way she still is, Jack thinks. It is this thought which softens his irritation with her.

  ‘I can’t seem to find your book, Princess.’

  Her clenched face opens into an impish smile, showing her teeth, a slightly menacing false set, of which she is inordinately proud. The slangy royal soubriquet, which she would not tolerate from anybody else, never fails to charm.

  ‘Hans,’ she says softly.

  She has always called him Hans. In the early days he thought it a pet name, the sort of appellation couples late to love might bashfully employ, and it pleased him. Now since Anastasia spends so much of her time steeped in an irretrievable past, he imagines she is mistaking him for some long-dead royal cousin from the house of Hesse.

  ‘Two eggs, sunny side up. And some coffee.’

  Wrong again, Hans.

  An
astasia has a weakness for coffee, peppering it with four or five sachets of sugar pocketed from the cafeteria where they lunch daily. She is a magpie, always stealing. Plastic spoons from the diner, handfuls of coasters from the Farmington Country Club. Any unwanted food she orders to be wrapped in foil and taken home to the animals. A lifetime of charity has made her thrify in small things, although she is extravagant by nature. After ten years with Anastasia this self-imposed privation still humbles Jack. When he looks at her what he considers absurd is not that this bent-up old woman is a member of the royal house of Romanov, the only surviving daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, but that she is Mrs Jack Manahan.

  They always sit at the same booth in the cafeteria. The corner window seat with its red leatherette banquette and spangly Formica table top. Anastasia orders the same bizarre collection of food every day. Cottage cheese and mashed potato followed by an ice-cream sundae. Baby food. As Jack watches her spoon the melting concoction into her mouth, dribbling slightly as she does, he can almost see in her darting blue gaze the mischievous child who earned the nickname Schwibsik. Imp! Jack likes to keep an eye on the other diners. It is a watchfulness he has inherited from his wife, this constant fear of ambush as if the past might suddenly and clamorously intrude. He half-expects to look up one day and find a troop of Reds on horseback shattering the plate-glass window and crashing through.

  The regulars pay little heed to them. Their indifference is an indulgence, Jack realises, and one that Anastasia welcomes after years of avid scrutiny. But every so often he wants to still the juke-box music. He wants to hush the squealing laughter of the high-school girls who gather in clutches, six to a booth; halt the gloomy mastication of the lightly dusted workmen sitting at the counter; silence the cheery banter of the bustling waitresses. He wants the patrons of this common little diner to rise as one and bow down before her. He knows how foolish this is, but Jack has grown accustomed to his own foolishness; he has spent a decade treading a fine line between devotion and ridicule. He knows how they see Anastasia – a crazy old dame who should be locked up. What he sees is a woman of noble birth stranded in a cheap, democratic modernity that will not recognise her.

  He makes his way to the small kitchen and starts to brew the coffee. Anastasia likes it hangover strength and black. Jack stands at the sink and gazes out across the driveway at the large colonial house which they have recently had to abandon. There was not enough room for them, the animals and the junk. (Since they’ve moved the dogs have been banished to the garden. The garden, he mocks quietly to himself, peering out at the overgrown yard.) He and Anastasia are now in the servant’s quarters, where the butler lived until his death. James had been with the Manahans since Jack was a boy, and he treated Anastasia’s arrival in their household as a catastrophe. Jack looks around the once spartan and neat quarters of his patient servant. Now it is going the same way as the main house. Outside is a thicket of bramble and creeper. Jack likes the green gloom it lends the house, as if they were living in a medieval castle within which a princess slumbers. The vine has wound its way around the trees and up the walls of the house, weaving towards the gutters, clinging to masonry and timber alike. What the realtors once described as an elegant property has become a rank wilderness littered with dog shit.

  Only the kitchen escapes the squalor because Anastasia rarely ventures in there. Here the last vestiges of an ordered life are evident. The ill-stocked fridge of a bachelor, the wipe-down surfaces, the sturdy tubular table. Bare and clean as a monk’s cell. Jack fishes out the frying pan from the cupboard beneath the sink. His back locks momentarily as he bends and it takes him some moments to straighten. He chastises his own stiffness. He cannot afford to give in to the indignities of old age with Anastasia to care for. What on earth would she do without him? He rarely asks himself what he would do without her. He cracks the eggs on the skillet rim. They fall with a satisfying splat. As they sizzle he sets out a tray with a plate, napkin and cutlery. He opens the window and plucks a milky trumpet of convolvulus from the green confusion and drops it into a slim-necked vase. He still persists with such gestures though Anastasia barely notices. He does it for himself, a way of counteracting his helplessness in the face of Anastasia’s excesses. Alone, he would never have lived like this, but the effort of resisting her is too much. She attracts filth and chaos as if exotic misery was the price exacted for her enormous pride. She almost welcomes it, he suspects; it is somehow proof that she was born for something better but has been reduced to this. It is a lesson to the world.

  It is not that he would swap his life with Anastasia for the life he had before. No, he has willingly embraced this ruin. It is an intoxicating and enviable madness. But here in this kitchen he catches glimpses of the old notion of himself, the man who was once a professor of history and political science, a southern gentleman, a respected member of the community. He gazes across at his former home and he can smell it rotting, like his reputation, into the foetid undergrowth.

  Under the circumstances their alliance was unlikely to have a fairy-tale ending – plain Jack Manahan marries a princess. He was twenty years her junior for a start and neither of them were spring chicks. There were those who considered him a gold-digger despite the fact that he was doing very nicely, thank you, before the Grand Duchess Anastasia entered his life. He didn’t need the whiff of Romanov gold in his nostrils. A mature bachelor (he was forty-nine when he married), Jack had family money to sustain him. What would he have gained by marrying Anastasia? A lot of rumour and innuendo, notoriety certainly. But no loot, as the newspapers had so ungraciously put it. The court case had decided that. After thirty-two years, the German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe finally reached a verdict on Anastasia’s identity in 1970. Not proven. By which stage she and Jack were already married.

  It was two years before the judgment that Gleb Botkin, Anastasia’s childhood friend, first told Jack about his future wife. She was still in Europe then, courtesy of Prince Friedrich, Duke of Saxe-Altenburg at Unterlengenhardt in the Black Forest. Gleb spoke of the crumbling barrack rooms she lived in, her continuing illness, the ongoing legal process and the unwanted attention of the press. She was the ‘milch cow of journalists’, she had written to Gleb. Jack had been touched. He offered Botkin the price of Anastasia’s passage to the United States, appalled that a royal personage of such import should be reduced to filth and penury.

  He did not know then Anastasia’s propensity for squalor, her appetite for it. She had insisted that the front yard be covered in cardboard, for example, and once he had found a large tree stump she had dragged in, sitting in its pocket of earth in the middle of the drawing-room floor. A stranger, if he didn’t know any better, might imagine Anastasia a peasant, with her newspapers laid on the floor for the cats to defecate into and the fermenting stink of the yard. But no, Jack insists to anyone who will listen, it is only the world’s refusal to believe that has turned her mind. Here was a woman who had survived the most horrific slaughter of the innocents; had been reviled by her own flesh and blood, and scorned by a sceptical world. Had she not the right to be a little odd? More importantly for Jack, a compulsive genealogist, here was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

  Botkin had turned up at one of Jack’s genealogical society meetings. Jack enjoyed these little soirées, though the matrons of Charlottesville were not as keen as their chairman would have liked. For them it was a social occasion, a chance to sit around Jack’s elegantly worn dining room and be served tea and small cakes by James. They paid scant attention to his laboriously constructed charts and only perked up if their own names were mentioned. Gleb Botkin, when he turned up unannounced, was unusual in that he was a man and most of Jack’s acolytes were female. It was a warm evening and Gleb lingered after the meeting came to a close and even the most tenacious lady members had reluctantly left for home. James had already started clearing as Jack steered Gleb towards the door. Behind them the testy tinkle of teaspoons and the irritated clack of plates testified to h
ow late James considered the hour. The tall Russian stood on the threshold smoking furiously. He held the butt delicately like a novice and frowned as he inhaled, as if smoking were a highly skilled activity. The two men stood amidst the thrum of crickets. Botkin seemed uneasy, yet he was reluctant to leave.

  ‘Ah, the Milky Way, laid out for our delectation and how rarely we look up,’ Jack said by way of conversation, gazing at the arc of littered stars overhead. The Russian puffed away seriously. He toyed with the pebbles on Jack Manahan’s driveway with his foot.

  ‘Tell me, Dr Manahan,’ he said, sighing emphatically, ‘do you know anything of the name …’ he paused as if the whole subject wearied him, ‘Romanov?’

  ‘You mean the royal Romanovs?’

  Gleb sighed again, as if lost in sorrowful thought. It was something Jack would come to know well, Gleb’s syncopated conversation. He continued as if Jack had not spoken.

  ‘I have a particular interest in the Romanovs, Dr Manahan. My father was their doctor. He perished with them in Siberia.’ Gleb gazed up at the night sky. ‘I was a playmate to the imperial children, one of whom still lives. Anastasia.’

  Jack felt a shivering tingle of shock. Such were the jangling conjunctions of the world. Standing on his lawn in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was suddenly connected by the word of a stranger to the slaughter of a royal family in a long-ruined empire a half-century before.

  If Gleb had not mentioned Anastasia, he might have walked off into the summer’s night and the two men would never have met again. It was Jack who cultivated the friendship. He immediately set about drawing up the Romanov family tree and the next time he met Gleb he was able to show off his handiwork. It was both a labour of love and a task coloured by genealogical envy. Jack might have been able to trace Anastasia’s ancestry back through three hundred years of Romanov rule, but Gleb had played in the sands of the Crimea with a grand duchess in the summer of 1914. Jack would never be able to compete with that.