The Resurrection of the Romanovs (34 page)

Prince Friedrich told Anderson that the questions had come from Prince Sigismund, and related to his experiences at Spala in 1912. Contrary to the legend, she didn’t volunteer the obscure information that Sigismund had lodged in Count de Freedericksz’s suite; rather, she had been asked who had stayed in these rooms. This was a rather obvious—if unintentional—clue pointing her to the correct reply, particularly as she knew the questions concerned Sigismund’s visit. Questions 4 and 5 themselves answered question 3, but there was more: despite what Sigismund and his brother-in-law believed, answers to two thirds of the questions had already appeared in print, in the memoirs of Anna Vyrubova and former courtier Alexander Spiridovich, and perhaps in other works as well. She certainly had the first book, as she had read it at Seeon; given her large collection of Romanov memoirs, it would be odd if by 1932 she did not have Spiridovich’s 1928 memoirs.
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Still, how was Anderson able to correctly answer all of the other remaining questions? The simple answer is that, contrary to what history has been led to believe, she didn’t; according to Sigismund, she provided only “enough correct answers” to satisfy him that she was Anastasia.
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Unfortunately, Sigismund never revealed just how many of the questions she answered correctly; how many she answered incorrectly; and how many she may not have answered at all. Even more revealing, though, is the way in which the answers came. When Prince Friedrich first presented her with the list, she looked at it, pondered the questions, and declared that she could answer them but insisted that she needed time to think. She kept the list for five days; only at the end of the week did she finally offer her replies.
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Was this simply, as her supporters often held, a struggle to overcome her damaged memory? Or did this interval allow the claimant time to seek out the answers to the prince’s queries?

Though Sigismund was convinced, he did not meet Anderson until 1957, when he finally came to visit her at Unterlengenhardt and after three days restated his belief that she was his cousin.
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Not knowing the content of the eighteen questions, critics turned on Sigismund himself. His cousin Lord Mountbatten confessed himself “astonished” to learn of this recognition, saying that the prince “knew Anastasia even less well than I did.”
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And there was something else: Sigismund also was firmly convinced that an elderly Dutch aristocratic lady calling herself Marga Boodts was, in fact, his cousin Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaievna, despite the fact that she had been unmasked decades earlier. “We spoke of so many familiar matters that an outsider could not have known about,” he explained, “because they were things that had happened between us two.”
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But no one else believed her claim, at least no other Romanov relative, and Anderson’s opponents were convinced that Sigismund was simply unreliable. “So much for the value of his testimony!” Lord Mountbatten once commented.
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But Sigismund’s recognition also brought his brother-in-law Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg aboard the claimant’s case. Friedrich had never met Anastasia, though he had peripheral ties to the Romanovs: son of the last duke of Saxe-Altenburg, his mother was a cousin of Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, and another relative, Elisabeth, had married Nicholas II’s distant cousin Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. Anderson’s answers to Sigismund’s questions apparently convinced Friedrich that she was Anastasia.
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He became one of her most dedicated and long-suffering supporters, alternately cherished and then abused by the ever-temperamental claimant, though his belief never wavered despite her mercurial treatment.

Equally sure of his opinion was Charles Sidney Gibbes, former English tutor to the imperial children. In 1926, on hearing of Anderson’s claim, he wrote an urgent and excited letter to Alexandra Gilliard: “This news has greatly astonished me, and I don’t know whether it is true or not.” He implored her, “Please, tell me how far I may believe the news that Anastasia Nikolaievna has been found. If it is so, please give her my most heartfelt greetings.”
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This must have been astonishing indeed, for Gibbes later insisted, “I have never doubted that Grand Duchess Anastasia perished at Ekaterinburg.”
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Apparently the Gilliards assured Gibbes not to worry himself over an impostor, for he waited nearly thirty years to meet the claimant. When they finally came face-to-face, he said, Anderson “looked at me suspiciously over the top of a newspaper, which she continued to hold on all occasions in front of her face so that only her eyes and hair were visible. This tactic she continued to use every time I saw her and never permitted me of her own will to see the whole of her face. From behind the newspaper she stretched forth a hand and gave me the tips of her fingers to shake. Such features as were visible did not correspond in any way with those of the Grand Duchess I had known and I consider that, even bearing in mind the years that had passed between 1918 and 1954, the Grand Duchess Anastasia whom I knew could not have become anything like the woman now calling herself Grand Duchess Anastasia. It is true that her hair had been dyed, but nevertheless the texture of her hair was extremely coarse and fuzzy, whereas the hair of the real Grand Duchess Anastasia had been very fine and soft. The so-called Grand Duchess Anastasia expressed no pleasure at meeting me again, made no recognition of me, made no conversation, asked me no questions, but merely answered questions I put to her. . . . I showed her six photographs that I had taken with me. She looked at each and shook her head and indicated that they meant nothing to her. These pictures actually were of the rooms in which the Grand Duchess Anastasia had lived, of the pet dog with which she had played, and of the teachers who had taught her. I did not show her any pictures or photographs of the Imperial Family, as she would probably have recognized them. I understand she had a collection of 2,000 postcards and photographs. On the last time I saw the so-called Grand Duchess to say goodbye to her, I was able to approach nearer to her and look over the top of the paper, and saw her whole face and in particular her right ear. Her right ear does not in any way resemble the right ear of the true Grand Duchess Anastasia, as I have a photograph that clearly displays the ear and its peculiar shape. She in no way resembles the true Grand Duchess Anastasia that I had known, and I am quite satisfied that she is an imposter.”
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By this time, Gibbes had become an Orthodox priest, habitually clad in sweeping robes and sporting a long white beard, so perhaps it wasn’t altogether unexpected that a surviving Anastasia would fail to recognize Gibbes nor, after thirty-six years, he her. Gibbes asserted, after this meeting, that “it was clear that she knew no English.”
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This was clearly wrong; by 1954 English had joined German as Anderson’s language of choice. Why she apparently refused to speak it with the former English tutor, though, was an entirely different, speculative issue. But Gibbes found something else odd: in the 1920s, Anderson had told Rathlef-Keilmann that Gibbes was “altogether different from Mr. Gilliard, but we were very fond of him, too. He always held his head slightly to one side; one side of his body was deformed, and he rather trailed one foot.”
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She later repeated this, saying that Gibbes had “a limping leg.”
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This Gibbes rejected: “Had I been dead,” he said, “it might have been difficult to prove, but being yet alive and happily in full possession of both my legs, I am able to say that I limp only in the imagination of Mme. Tchaikovsky.”
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And balanced against the compelling rejection by Gibbes was the compelling recognition by Lili Dehn. As one of Empress Alexandra’s closest and most trusted confidantes, Lili often had spent time with the imperial family and knew Anastasia well. In 1957, Prince Sigismund visited her in Caracas, showing her photographs of the claimant and insisting she was genuine. At his urging, Dehn traveled to Unterlengenhardt that autumn to judge for herself.
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She had last seen a fifteen-year-old Anastasia at Tsarskoye Selo forty years earlier; she now faced a middle-aged woman peering nervously over the top of a blanket held up to her face. “Should I know you?” she asked her visitor. “You remind me somehow of my mother.”

Lili Dehn in old age.

Lili looked at her, at “her poor, pale, aged little face. My first impression was terribly sad, but as soon as I heard her voice, I knew: it was so familiar to me, so real—it was the voice of Grand Duchess Anastasia. No one can imitate the voice or manner of speech of a stranger.” She noticed her hands: Anderson’s hands, Lili said, were “exactly like those of the Empress, with all three middle fingers being of the same length.” When Anderson finally asked, “We were together . . . near the end?” it was all the evidence Dehn needed: “It was clear that she had recognized me,” she declared. They spoke in English—“very good English” was how Lili described Anderson’s speech. The claimant refused to speak Russian, and Lili did not press her; she did note, though, that she pronounced the names of various courtiers “in the best Russian manner,” which to Dehn was “evidence that Frau Anderson could both speak and understand the language.”
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If initial impressions had convinced her that Anderson was Anastasia, it was, for Lili, what followed over the week at Unterlengenhardt that cemented this belief, when the claimant “impressed her with her inexplicable and intimate knowledge” of life within the imperial family.
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It was a lengthy and seemingly impressive list: the claimant, said Lili, spoke of Nicholas Sablin and knew that he had deserted the Romanovs after the Revolution; remembered Anastasia’s hospital at Tsarskoye Selo; knew the nickname for Lili’s son; recalled certain events Lili had witnessed with Anastasia at the Alexander Palace during the Revolution; could describe the color of the carpets in the empress’s private apartments; had “mentioned one occasion” witnessed by Lili and by Anastasia when the empress had been “angry” with Anna Vyrubova; mentioned that governess Sophie Tiutcheva had left her post at court amid a scandal; and correctly identified the color of a dress worn by the empress in a black-and-white photograph.
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“Don’t bother to tell me that she had read these things in books,” Lili declared.
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Like Prince Sigismund, Lili believed Anderson had revealed intimate knowledge only Anastasia could have possessed. Like the prince, though, she was wrong, for by 1957 a wealth of information about the Romanovs had been published, including the decoration of their rooms in the Alexander Palace. Anderson was well aware of Sablin, whom she had met in 1922 in Berlin; had discussed the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo with both Tatiana Botkin and Felix Dassel, and owned the latter’s memoirs as well as a souvenir album of the facility; and Lili had detailed her experiences with Anastasia during the Revolution in her own 1922 book, which also had revealed her son’s nickname.
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Anderson had asked Dehn if she recalled “that ill-mannered governess,” whom she identified as Tiutcheva when prompted. Numerous books, including Lili’s own memoirs, had chronicled the governess’s disagreements over Rasputin’s presence in the palace, but when pressed for details Anderson said, “You know exactly why she was sent away!”
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Details of a temporarily strained relationship between Empress Alexandra and Vyrubova also had appeared in numerous works. Anderson was vague on the issue, as Dehn admitted: aside from mentioning some disagreement between the pair, she could not recall when or where the argument had taken place, or even what it had concerned; it was enough, Dehn insisted, “that Frau Anderson remembered it at all.”
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The color of the empress’s dress? It was mauve, Anderson said correctly, but then, a skeptic might have suggested, it was well known that this had been Alexandra’s favorite color. And the fact that Anderson’s middle fingers were of the same length, “exactly like those of the Empress”? Lili may have believed this to be true, but it was not: X-rays of Alexandra’s hands, preserved in the Russian State Archives in Moscow, show that she had long, tapering fingers of noticeably different lengths.

But for Lili there was no doubt that Anderson was Anastasia. “I have recognized her both physically and intuitively,” she declared.
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The claimant’s supporters took it all as definitive evidence in her favor; even the judges during Anderson’s lawsuit for recognition as Anastasia accorded Dehn special weight, writing that her opinion merited “special consideration, given her intimacy with the Imperial Family.”
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Anderson’s critics, on the other hand, suggested that too many years had passed for Dehn to physically recognize Anastasia in the claimant, and that her decision relied more on emotion than on reason. Dehn, though, was adamant; despite unfounded rumors that she had later wavered in her opinion, Lili remained—as her family confirms—completely convinced that Anderson was Anastasia.
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