The Secret Wife(83)
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
With only ten days to go before she had to leave the States, Kitty drove to Gloversville to collect Tatiana’s notebook from Vera and to return the books about the Romanovs she had borrowed. Over a cup of coffee she shared the information she had gleaned about Dmitri’s life after he left Russia.
‘I assume he went to Berlin because it was a meeting point for White Russians after the civil war. He met his wife Rosa and they had two children, but perhaps they left in 1934 to escape the Nazis, because Rosa was Jewish. Dmitri would have been forty-eight when the Second World War began, so wouldn’t have been called up to fight, but I have no idea how he earned a living or why he only wrote two more novels after coming to America.’ She took a bite of the home-baked cookie Vera had put on a plate beside her. It was gooey with peanut butter.
Vera couldn’t help. ‘You assume in this day and age that you can find anything you want to know on the Internet but it’s simply not true.’
‘Are you working on anything interesting now?’ Kitty’s mouth was gummed up with peanut butter, making her words sound indistinct.