The Secret Wife(86)

There were invitations to pot luck suppers, Thanksgiving dinners, Fourth of July celebrations, and summer cook-outs, with the children always included. They weren’t people Dmitri would normally have picked as friends but they had enough in common to pass a pleasant evening. He often watched Rosa as she mingled at a social event and wondered at her ability to thrive in this new society yet still retain her sense of self. As she aged, she had never toned down her quirky style; if anything her clothes had become more colourful in this new country and she still had boyish short hair. Dmitri bought her a Singer sewing machine for her fortieth birthday and she was able to run up new frocks with lightning speed, often making garments for friends as well.



He knew she missed her family and that it had been a big wrench for her to cross the ocean to this new continent, but she never once complained. Nicholas and Marta were learning English faster than expected, and already spoke with American accents. They liked Superman and Flash Gordon comics and each had their favourite baseball teams. All would have been well, Dmitri thought, except that he couldn’t seem to get started on a new novel. The strong feelings that had inspired his earlier works just weren’t there. Perhaps it was because he was content. Did he have to be miserable to write?

In 1936, they moved to Albany, 130 miles north of New York City, where Dmitri was able to afford a three-bedroom house with its own spacious garden, and within months Rosa had made a brand new circle of friends. Her mother and sister arrived later that year, their immigration sponsored by Dmitri, and they moved into a house a few blocks down the same street. Nicholas and Marta were delighted and often ran to visit their grandmother, for reasons Dmitri could never understand. He found her cold and unfriendly but the children seemed to adore her.

Sometimes Dmitri sat back and watched his children and wondered who they were. When they were little it had been easy to see what motivated them because the emotions were on the surface: ‘I want that toy and Nicholas is playing with it’; ‘I’m exhausted and really need to sleep but I’m fighting it in the hope of getting another story’. But now, as they entered their teens, they had become independent people who had learned to tell fibs, to have secrets, and to rebel against his authority.

‘Count yourself lucky: my father would have horse-whipped you for that,’ he told Nicholas, who was sobbing after receiving a clip round the ear for using coarse language.



‘Your father sounds like an asshole!’ Nicholas shouted through his tears, and Dmitri couldn’t help but admire his courage as he dealt out a punishment with the flat of his hand on bare legs.

Rosa never hit them but Dmitri knew he had to protect them from their own impulsiveness so they didn’t get into trouble when they were older. He would never beat them with a whip, as his father had beaten him, but every child needed chastisement to keep them in line, for their own sakes.

Hitler’s invasion of neighbouring countries and the outbreak of a new war only twenty-one years after the last tipped Dmitri suddenly and emphatically into depression. He couldn’t believe that no lessons had been learned from the mass slaughter of the trenches. He couldn’t understand why no assassin slipped through the cordons that surrounded the Führer to end the world’s misery. He was anxious that he would no longer be able to support his family if naval blockades prevented the import of rugs. Suddenly, he could see no happiness in the life that had previously seemed so sunny; it was as if a shutter had come down that made everything dark and hopeless. Men were intrinsically evil the world over, from the Red Guards who had slaughtered the Romanovs to the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung who were shipping Jews and Communists off to live in segregated ghettos.

Rosa did her best to buoy him, remaining her cheerful self and asking nothing of him except his presence. He felt guilty that he had been such a poor choice of partner for her: he had spent their first ten years hankering after another woman, and now he was nothing but a dead weight, who found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. His adolescent children irritated and exhausted him: Marta was too interested in boys for a girl of her young age and when he confined her to her room, she would climb out the window; Nicholas never missed an opportunity to argue with him. Everything he said or did was wrong, as far as his kids were concerned.



Once America entered the war in both Europe and the Pacific, Dmitri sank to new depths of depression and stopped going to work. There seemed little point, since they had only occasional shipments to process. Alex continued to wire money, and that made Dmitri feel useless – a grown man who could not support his own family – but he could not afford to refuse it. He spent his days poring over the newspaper or listening to reports of the war on the radio and often did not bother to change out of his pyjamas. He was too old to fight, and of no further use to the world.

Sometimes he took Tatiana’s diary from the old brown suitcase where he still kept it, the one he had brought with him from Istanbul in 1922. When he read her descriptions of those last days in the Ipatiev House, it reminded him once again of his failure to save her and made him feel more useless than ever. In the evenings he drank until he passed out or made himself sick, then suffered the following morning. After a night out drinking in Berlin in the old days, he’d felt no more than a little stuffy-headed but now hangovers wiped him out. A symptom of age.

Up till then, Dmitri had caught the train to New York once or twice a year to have luncheon with Alfred Knopf. They were always convivial occasions at the city’s great restaurants – the Waldorf, Barbetta, the exclusive 21 Club – and the meal would last from twelve-thirty through to four or five in the afternoon, by which time copious quantities of alcohol would have been consumed and Dmitri would have to stagger back to Grand Central to catch the train home. Alfred’s secretary would telephone three weeks in advance to arrange these luncheons, but when she rang in March 1942 to set a date Dmitri told her he would not be able to make it.