Natasha's Dream Read Online Free PDF Page B

healed properly, and a tubercular lesion had developed. She had been a patient since July, and was being cared for skilfully and compassionately.
    One very intelligent person who had interested himself in her claim was Inspector Franz Grunberg of the Berlin police. Something of an amateur historian, he became fascinated by her story and by what he considered her credibility. He had met her three years ago, in 1922, and did not take long to decide she was who she said she was, the GrandDuchess Anastasia Nicolaievna. His investigation into her claim was exhaustive, and he put up with behaviour both unreasonable and eccentric. She could be unbearably difficult and, on occasions, completely impossible. But, since he accepted that her story was true, he also accepted that her terrible ordeal at Ekaterinburg could not have failed to have a destructive effect on her nerves and behaviour. Her unreasonableness, therefore, was reasonable, and her impossible moods did not shake his belief in her. However, since the summer of 1925 he had allowed a Russian émigré, Harriet von Rathlef, to take his place as her closest friend and confidante. Harriet von Rathlef, quite Russian despite her German-sounding name, was absolutely certain the woman was Anastasia.
    She had appeared in Berlin in 1920, when she had jumped into the icy waters of the Landwehr Canal from the Bendler Bridge. She was pulled out and taken to the Elisabeth Hospital in the Lutzowstrasse. She was there for six weeks, during which time she persistently refused to tell anyone who she was. She was afraid of the Bolsheviks, she said, and kept her face covered as much as she could. The doctorsnoted her jaw had been badly injured at some time, disfiguring her. After six weeks, she was transferred to the Dalldorf Asylum, where it was felt she could be better treated. They called her
Fräulein Unbekannt
(Miss Unknown). They diagnosed that she was suffering from mental depression or melancholia.
    At Dalldorf, she was given a thorough physical examination, much to her torment and distress. The doctors understood her anguish when they discovered her body was covered with scars. She would not explain why, and she still refused to give any information about her identity. She exhibited a great fear of people getting too close, and a great distaste for being touched. After some months, however, she began to talk to the nurses, all of whom showed her kindness and sympathy. They formed the opinion that she was intelligent, courteous, educated and well bred. They also found her gracious, meticulous and certainly of an aristocratic background.
    But it was two years before she suddenly made the declaration that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicolaievna. The first people to believe her were the nurses who had watched her and cared for her since her arrivalat Dalldorf. To them, she fitted their image of a royal personage, and they made allowances for her bad days. They had seen her scars and they knew she must have experienced moments that were dreadful, horrible and savage.
    Her story, pieced together from her disjointed recollections over a period of many weeks, dated from the night of 16th July 1918, when in the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg, the Bolshevik guards murdered the Imperial family of Russia and their servants. She did not give a lucid or detailed account. She offered snatches of a nightmare.
    ‘I fainted. Everything was blue, and I saw stars dancing and there was a great roar …’
    That was what she said, and whatever the truth, who could have dissociated such words from the most terrifying moments of Anastasia’s life?
    She was discovered to be still alive by one of the Red soldiers, Alexander Tschaikovsky, who carried her unobserved from the scene of the carnage. He hid her in a nearby house and returned for her days later. With the help of his mother, sister and brother, he began a hazardous journey of escape on a cart. Horribly injured by bullets and a bayonet, she lay