The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (31 page)

Meanwhile, another Hohenzollern, Princess Irene’s son Prince Sigismund of Prussia, dispatched from his home in Costa Rica a list of eighteen questions for the claimant to answer. They were secret things from their childhood, he said, which only his first cousin Anastasia could know. The claimant answered sufficiently well for Sigismund, sight unseen, to announce, “This has convinced me. She is undoubtedly Anastasia of Russia.”
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Even the old ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II, living in exile in Holland, sent his second wife, Empress Hermine, to visit the
claimant in a German sanatorium. No statement was issued, but from this august quarter, silence was assumed to mean assent.

The character of the young woman her purported relatives saw during these years was often unappealing. If she could be moody and rudely uncommunicative to a visiting Russian baroness or to German princesses, her behavior was far worse toward people who took her in and tried to help. In their presence, she was irritable, demanding, and despotic. Her temper was ferocious. “She gets so angry sometimes that she becomes simply frightening,” said one of her hostesses. “Her eyes acquire a fierce expression and she just trembles.” At such moments, she would threaten to “pave the streets with the skulls of her enemies” and to “hang all her relatives from lampposts for their treason.” She had no home or money, but usually it was she who would terminate a visit, storming out the door, hurling imprecations. Always, there was somewhere else to go. She moved endlessly from family to family, house to house, and, eventually, castle to castle. During the sixty-four years the claimant lived after being pulled from the canal, she was always dependent on benevolence and charity.

Poor health provided a partial excuse for her behavior. Particularly in the early years, she was always ill, shuttling in and out of hospitals, asylums, and sanatoria. In 1925, suffering from tuberculosis of the bone, she nearly died. Her mental health, also, was unstable. Her nerves were shattered and her memory impaired; this was the reason, her supporters said, that she had forgotten both Russian and English and spoke exclusively in German. Tatiana Botkin gave this explanation: “Her attitude is childlike, and altogether she cannot be reckoned with as an adult, responsible person, but must be led and directed as a child. She has not only forgotten languages, but she has in general lost the power of accurate narration, although not of thought. Even the simplest stories … she tells incoherently and incorrectly; they are really only words strung together in impossibly ungrammatical German.… Her defect is obviously in the region of the memory and in eye trouble. She says that, after her illness, she forgot how to tell time and had laboriously to learn it again.”

The claimant’s inability—or refusal—to speak Russian constituted a major stumbling block in her effort to be recognized as Anastasia. There were those, like the nurse at Dalldorf, who said that they had heard her speak “Russian like a native … she used whole, complete, connected sentences without any impediments.” A doctor’s report during the same period declared: “In her sleep, she speaks Russian with good pronunciation; mostly unessential things.” More often, she gave the impression that she understood Russian, although she did not speak it. The Russian surgeon who operated on her tubercular arm in 1925 said, “Before the operation, I spoke Russian with her, and she answered all my questions, although in German.”

Her supporters were divided: some, like Tatiana Botkin, blamed her
inability
to speak Russian on damage to her brain and consequent memory loss; others said that her
refusal
to speak her native language was the result of psychological inhibition caused by the trauma of imprisonment and the night in the cellar. The claimant herself explained that in Ekaterinburg the family was compelled to speak Russian so that the omnipresent guards could listen to their conversation; the language of the guards was rough, vile, and frequently obscene; the last words she heard in the cellar were Russian. Russian, to her, was the language of humiliation, terror, and death. Among her opponents, naturally, it was said that she did not speak Russian because she could not. The issue was never resolved. In 1965, a frustrated German judge tried singing Russian songs to her to determine whether she understood. She listened to him, impervious.

The most important potential witnesses were, of course, the principal members of the family she claimed to be her own, the Romanovs. Anastasia’s grandmother the Dowager Empress Marie had survived the revolution and returned to live in her native Denmark. The old woman, the senior surviving member of the dynasty, having refused to listen to reports of the death of her son and his family, had no interest in stories that one of her granddaughters, having borne a child out of wedlock, had appeared in Berlin. Empress Marie’s older daughter, Grand Duchess Xenia, living in London as a permanent
guest of King George V, was not interested either. But the younger of Marie’s two daughters, Grand Duchess Olga, refused to turn her back, unseeing, on a young woman who might be her cherished Malenkaya (Little One).

In their youthful Aunt Olga Alexandrovna, the four young grand duchesses had had a special friend and benefactress. Every Saturday, she came from St. Petersburg to spend the day with her nieces at Tsarskoe Selo. Convinced that the young women needed to get away from the palace, she persuaded Empress Alexandra to let her take them to the city. Accordingly, every Sunday morning, the aunt and her four excited nieces boarded a train for the capital. The first stop was a formal luncheon with their grandmother the dowager empress. From there, they went on to tea, games, and dancing with other young people at Olga Alexandrovna’s house. “The girls enjoyed every minute of it,” the grand duchess wrote over fifty years later. “Especially my dear goddaughter [Anastasia]. I can still hear her laughter rippling all over the room. Dancing, music, games—she threw herself wholeheartedly into them all.”

Olga Alexandrovna herself had not had a happy early life. Wed at nineteen to Prince Peter of Oldenburg, a man not interested in women, she obtained, after fifteen years of unconsummated marriage, her brother’s permission for annulment. In 1916, she married the man she loved, a commoner, Colonel Nicholas Kulikovsky. After the revolution, Olga, her husband, and their two sons, Tikhon and Guri, settled in Denmark with her mother, the dowager empress. When news came of the claimant’s appearance, Grand Duchess Olga wrote to Pierre Gilliard, the former tutor of French to the Imperial children: “Please go at once to Berlin to see the poor lady. Suppose she really were the little one.… It would be such a disgrace if she were living all alone in her misery.… If it really is she, please send me a wire and I will come to Berlin to meet you.”

Gilliard was superbly qualified to carry out this mission. He knew the children of the Russian Imperial family better than any of those who had yet seen the claimant. For thirteen years, he had lived in the inner circle of the Imperial household, tutoring the young grand duchesses and the tsarevich several times a week. Gilliard’s dedication
to the family was absolute. He followed them to Siberia and spent the winter with them in Tobolsk, continuing to give lessons, arranging French plays for his pupils to act in, and sawing wood in the courtyard with Nicholas and the tsarevich. He traveled with the family to Ekaterinburg, where only forcible separation by the Ural Soviet prevented him from joining them in the Ipatiev House. After the carnage in the cellar and the fall of the town to the Whites, Gilliard assisted Nicholas Sokolov in his investigation. Sifting through the grim remnants of the Four Brothers mine shaft, he cried out, “But the children? The children?” Gilliard left Russia in the company of the young grand duchesses’ maid, Alexandra Tegleva, called Shura. Returning to his native Switzerland in 1919, he married Shura and took up a professorship at the University of Lausanne.

When Pierre Gilliard received Grand Duchess Olga’s letter, he and his wife departed immediately for Berlin. The person they found in St. Mary’s Hospital was feverish, delirious, and hallucinating. A tubercular infection in her left arm, aggravated by a staphylococcus infection, had created an excruciating open wound. The arm itself had swollen “to a shapeless mass,” while the patient had shrunk to skeletal thinness. While the Gilliards sat by the bed, Shura asked to look at the patient’s feet. Grand Duchess Anastasia had suffered from a condition known as hallux valgus, a malformation of the joints at the root of both big toes which gave the impression that the enlarged knuckle was bent to one side. “The feet look like the Grand Duchess’s,” said Shura, when the blanket was removed. “With her [Anastasia] it was the same as here; the right foot was worse than the left.” Because the claimant was so ill, Gilliard insisted that she be moved to a better hospital. “The most important thing at the moment,” he said, “is to keep her alive. We will both come back as soon as her condition improves.” In a private clinic, a Russian surgeon removed the muscles and part of the bone of the left elbow, inserting a silver joint, which left bone permanently exposed. For weeks, the patient battled pain with repeated injections of morphine. Her weight dropped to under seventy-five pounds.

Three months later, Gilliard and his wife returned. First, Gilliard alone sat by the patient’s bed and said, “Please chat with me a little.
Tell me everything you know about your past.” The claimant was shocked and angry. “I do not know how to chat,” she retorted. “Do you think that if someone had tried to kill you, as they did me, you would know much from before?” Gilliard left. That afternoon, a woman in a violet cloak entered the room, came up to the bed, smiled, and offered her hand. It was Grand Duchess Olga. She came again the next morning, and the two continued to talk, Olga in Russian, the patient in German. In the afternoon, Shura appeared. When the patient covered her hand with eau de cologne, Shura remembered that Grand Duchess Anastasia, “who was mad about perfume,” often had done the same thing. Standing on the balcony watching this scene, Olga said to one of the claimant’s friends, “Our Little One and Shura seem very happy to have found one another again. I am so happy that I came, and I did it even though Mamma did not want me to. She was so angry with me.… And then my sister [Grand Duchess Xenia] wired me from England saying that under no circumstances should I come to see the Little One.” When Gilliard returned, he too seemed swept along by the belief that a family had been reunited. “I want to do everything I can to help the grand duchess,” he said. Turning to the surgeon who had operated on her, he asked, “What is Her Imperial Highness’s condition?” The doctor replied that her life was still in danger.

The next day, the third of this visit, Gilliard attempted again to question the patient about the past, especially Siberia. He had little success, and the visitors decided to leave. As Grand Duchess Olga departed, the patient burst into tears. Olga kissed her on both cheeks, saying, “Don’t cry. I will write. You must get well. That is the main thing.” As she left, the grand duchess told the Danish ambassador, who had escorted her, “My reason cannot grasp it, but my heart tells me that the Little One is Anastasia.” Shura departed weeping. “I loved her so much!” she sobbed. “I loved her so much! Why do I love this patient just as much? Can you tell me that?” Gilliard kept his feelings and opinions under tighter control, declaring as he left, “We are going away without being able to say that she is
not
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna.”

The affection displayed during the visit continued to cheer the patient for several months. From Copenhagen, Grand Duchess Olga
wrote five notes filled with endearments and concern. The first set the tone: “I am sending you all my love, am thinking of you all the time. It is so sad to go away, knowing that you are ill and suffering and lonely. Don’t be afraid. You are not alone now and we shall not abandon you.… Eat a lot and drink cream.” Olga’s third note was accompanied by a gift: “I am sending to my little patient my own silk shawl, which is very warm. I hope that you will wrap this shawl around your shoulders and arms and that it will keep you warm during the cold of winter. I bought this shawl in Yalta before the war.” The shawl was pure silk, rose colored, six feet long and four feet wide. But after the fifth letter, no more ever came.