The Secret Wife(68)
Dmitri nodded his head and accepted the wine, feeling devastated. The men scraped their chairs closer together to make room for him. ‘All the same,’ he continued, ‘I’d like to see her for myself. I knew Anastasia in St Petersburg when I …’
Boris held up a hand to stop him. ‘The first rule here is that you must be careful not to identify yourself as a monarchist. Keep your counsel. There are many Bolshevik spies in town and you can never tell who you are speaking to, especially after a few glasses of good Burgundy.’
‘Thank you. I appreciate your advice.’ Dmitri introduced himself and learned the names of the other four at the table, all of them Russian. He could tell from their accents that two were from the St Petersburg area, one from Moscow, two from Siberia, but he did not ask their backgrounds. They refilled his glass and when the bottle was empty Dmitri bought the next one.
At around midnight, when Dmitri’s words were slurred and his head spinning, Boris took him to a nearby apartment block and introduced him to the landlady, who fortunately had a small apartment available. Before he left, Boris pushed a piece of paper into his hand. ‘The address you wanted,’ he whispered. ‘But don’t get your hopes up.’
Next morning, after Dmitri had held his head under a cold tap to clear a thumping headache, then eaten a filling breakfast of sausage and sauerkraut in a café, he set off to find Baron von Kleist’s apartment. Boris’s note said it was on the fourth floor at number 9 Nettelbeckstrasse, which he found with the help of a street map borrowed from his landlady.
He rang the bell and when it was answered by a black-suited butler he asked, ‘I wonder if I might see Anna Tschaikovsky? Tell her it is Cornet Malama.’ His stomach was twisting with nerves. Was he about to learn the truth about what happened to Tatiana?
‘I’m sorry, sir. She is unwell and not seeing anyone.’
‘If I write a note, will you give it to her?’ he asked, and the butler agreed with a slight shrug.
Dmitri scribbled a message then and there, saying he was delighted to hear Anastasia was alive, and wondering if she had any news of the others. He said he would be happy to perform any services she might require of him and signed it ‘Malama’. ‘I’ll wait in the park across the road in case she changes her mind about seeing me,’ he explained.
He paced up and down, checking his pocket watch, looking up at the windows of the Baron’s apartment. Would she glance out to see if it was him?
An hour later, when there had been no word, he rang the bell at number 9 once more. ‘Did she read my note?’ he asked.
‘As I said, I’m afraid she will not see anybody,’ the butler repeated, expressionless.
Dmitri felt shattered. He had come so far and invested so much hope in this encounter that it was unbearable to have hit an impasse. There was nothing more he could do so he stopped in a café down the street to ease his disappointment with a tumbler of vodka.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Berlin, 1922
Dmitri spent long hours in the café near Baron von Kleist’s residence, watching the door in case the woman who claimed to be Anastasia might emerge, but there was no sign of her. One morning as he waited he found a copy of a Russian newspaper called Rul – ‘Rudder’ – lying abandoned on a table and flicked through it. Produced in Berlin, it reported on matters of interest to the city’s Russian community. From just a cursory read, Dmitri realised there were many factions: there were the pro-monarchists, the Bolsheviks, and the Constitutional Democrats, who thought Russia should enter into the modern age with free elections. The Whites accused the Bolsheviks of being Jews seeking global domination, and argued about the best way to wrest Russia from their control, while spies from the Cheka, the secret police, infiltrated their number and assassinations were not uncommon. He could see why Boris had recommended that he keep his counsel.
Dmitri had saved some money while working in Constantinople but he would need to earn more to keep himself, and the newspaper gave him an idea. He bought a notebook and wrote an article about the last stand of General Wrangel in Crimea, and his evacuation of the last remnants of the White Army from Sevastopol on the 14th of November 1920. The Bolsheviks had executed those they captured by tying their hands and feet and dropping them overboard into the Black Sea. Dmitri had seen many trussed-up corpses in the water, eyes bulging grotesquely, as he sailed to Constantinople. When he had finished, he walked to the offices of Rul and sat across a desk while the editor, a man named Burtsev, read his piece.
‘You write well,’ Burtsev told him, ‘and I have not seen a more compelling account of the final evacuation. I’ll pay you 5,000 marks for this story.’
That sounded good. ‘Can I write more for you?’ Dmitri asked.
‘Sure. If I like your articles, I will pay you. But get yourself a typewriter first.’
Dmitri bought a second-hand typewriter and taught himself to type with two fingers. He studied each issue of Rul, as well as its rival paper, Golos Rossii – ‘The Voice of Russia’ – which was edited by a man who had been Minister of Agriculture in the government of March to October 1917. Burtsev liked Dmitri’s work, and began to give him commissions, which Dmitri asked him to publish under the family name Yakovlevich so that he would not be identified; back home everyone had known him as Malama.