" Anastasia "
Anna Anderson Manahan (? --1984)
1.
I can see you now so clearly
in our classroom
seated in a wooden teacher's chair
beneath chalk-streaked blackboards,
your body like a bundle
of gray, ice-coated twigs
wrapped in the red cloth
of your ancestors.
Your face, hidden beneath
a Paige-boy haircut, sagged like candle-wax,
and those famed aquamarine eyes,
capable of burning
holes in the snow,
turned away to avoid contact with ours.
2.
Your husband with his crew cut and bow-tie said: "We've come here today to tell you the true history of Anastasia, her escape from Russia after the revolution and the remarkable story of how she made her way to the United States. Anastasia is seated here to my right, dressed in Romanov red, the only color she will wear other than white. Sometimes when we make these visits, she chooses to talk, and sometimes not. You can never predict what will happen. You know how moody royalty can be (laughing). But if she decides to speak, I ask everyone to be very quiet because her voice is soft and hard to understand. When's she done, I’ll tell everything she's said.”
3.
This collector and dealer
of antiquities and historical artifacts
could have sold us anything.
4.
We wanted to believe the possible
in the improbable.
We wanted the magic
ending to a tragic beginning.
We wanted the truth
to step from the Bolshevik shadows
and reveal itself.
We wanted the certainty etched
into your features
to bloom before us
with a beauty that didn't exist.
5.
The Tsarina wrote in her diary:
We are doing our best to settle into Ekaterinburg, here on the edge of nowhere. No one knows what is going on in the capital. Very little news reaches us. Nikki is doing his best to keep his chin up, to keep everyone as happy as we can be. He is so brave. He has made friends with the guards and is healthier than he ever has been. He splits wood all day long in the snow and the cold. The pile grows so large it seems like it could last us one hundred years. But it is only a matter of time before we are rescued. We hear the Whites and the Reds are fighting several hundred miles away, and it will be days or weeks before we are rescued. We sing before a roaring fire in the evenings. The girls and I sew and sew all the time, day and night, to take our minds off the indignity of our shaved heads, and to kill time until fate casts kind eyes back on us. Even Anastasia, our tomboy, has learned how to handle a needle and is helping us make clothes and curtains and tablecloths— anything to turn this house into a home. Lexi, who has been uncommonly healthy, wants to join in also since we are keeping him away from the axes and sleighs. And though he’s a boy, it's hard to say no.
6.
Who would have thought
to sew jewels
into corsets and underwear
to deflect the bullets,
blunt the thrust
of bayonets,
buy death off
with the wealth
of a defunct empire?
7.
Beneath the bodies some lived,
loaded onto the back of a pick-up
and driven into the woods,
warm beneath the cooling flesh
above them. The soldier who knew
did not betray as the others were soaked
in gasoline, and burned.
In a confusion of counting,
one slipped away
in the back of a hay wagon,
slipped out of the country,
out of this life
into what freedom
and anonymity
that could be had
with money and body.
8.
The Whites photographed the room in the basement of the Ipatiev House as proof the deed was done. In black and white, the bullet- riddled wallpaper torn and splattered with blood. Blood pooled on the floor like a river flowing backward to its source. The Reds failed to take their trophy picture with the forest mud still clinging to their boots, the smell of gasoline on their hands, their weapons cocked and faces smiling. They slinked away into darkness, these heroes of the revolution, most soon to be silenced themselves. Most soon to be forgotten, as they tried to forget this night.
9.
The police fished you out of a Berlin canal. A potential suicide by drowning. A mental case, with a broken jaw, and a recently delivered baby no one could find. Your soldier left when the money ran out. Now there was just despair and blackness calling you into the water.
10.
Proof?
We wanted to believe the impossible.
Photographs of ears
circulated around the room,
feet, beauty marks, handwriting,
the scars from bullets and bayonets,
follow by the affidavits of experts
written in French, German and Russian
certifying authenticity;
signed statements by minor Romanov family members
and friends swearing you know details
about the royal family that only
the real Anastasia could know.
But we needed more
than the traumatized lady in a Berlin mental hospital
who could not remember her own identity
for us to embrace the improbable.
11.
Ingrid Bergman was cast in the lead role. Hollywood's idea of a Russian princess, complete with a foreign accent and Swedish beauty. The world's picture of what a princess should look like, radiant in jewels and evening gowns as she mingled with the bluebloods of Europe like she were one of their own. Radiant even in poverty and mental illness. Radiant in pleading her case before the magistrates of Europe, or plying royalty for their hospitality and financial support.
12.
Apple-faced Annie,
the princess of rotten apples
is what the kids called you
on your Charlottesville street
as you cursed them
in another language,
and the grass grew high
in the yard, the paint
pealed to show the graying
wood trim around the house,
the gutters grew heavy
with leaves and rain water
and fell like soldiers
fighting a hopeless battle,
the Mercedes rusted,
and dogs and cats
multiplied until
they overran the house….
13.
As your husband talked,
your silence grew into a blizzard
around us, the snow whiting out
the Siberian fir trees,
the streets and courtrooms of Berlin,
the palaces of Saint Petersburg,
until we could no longer see the desks
in front of us, or our hands before our eyes,
just hear the voice speaking that urged
us forward into the unknown.
Then it was over and you were gone.
14.
Even our juvenile minds wondered
if you married this man
so much younger and more energetic
than yourself for his money,
his charm, his willingness
to champion the fight,
his ability to take care of you.
And if he fell in love with the history,
the adventure, the challenge
of proving a great mystery true.
15.
Years later, I read
of your death in the newspaper,
how the crematorium flames
left your mystery unsolved for all eternity
as your ashes scattered
on a German hillside
blew eastward towards Saint Petersburg.
16.
And years after that,
I read of the remains
that were discovered in Siberia,
skeletons burned and hacked,
splintered by bullets,
positively identified
as the Tsar and his family.
But no Alexie, no Anastasia.
17.
In a test tube at Martha Jefferson Hospital
an answer floats in formaldehyde,
the sectioned intestine
of one Franziska Schanzkowska.
And still many believe.
18.
Apple-faced Annie,
Franziska,
Anastasia,
whoever you are,
I still want to believe
that you are more
than just a Polish factory worker
gone mad,
that the light you saw
after the darkness of the canal
was something other than mere opportunism.
I want to believe those you duped
saw something science
was incapable of measuring.
I want to believe the hand I touched
cold as the arctic
had Russian royalty flowing through its veins,
and on the icons of Rasputin
that hung around the necks of the family
that last night,
on Rasputin’s final prayer scrawled
on the back in his own greasy handwriting,
and on the bones of the two
that were never found,
I swear I will always believe.
© 2005 Jim Doss
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