I Was Anastasia

by Ariel Lawhon

ten striated lines running vertically beneath her belly button. It’s only been a year. The stretch marks have not yet faded to silver. Their meaning is clear.

She knows that thrashing and shrieking won’t stop the pain, nor will it stop the baby from coming.

“Your water has broken. It will be soon now.”

is better this way. He will be given to a family that will care for him. Don’t worry. He will never remember where he came from.” But I will remember, Anna thinks as her eyes grow heavy and her limbs become weak. I will always remember.

could only spare one, so he spared me. He saved me that night on the train to Ekaterinburg.

wrapped in sheets, toward the entrance of an old, collapsed mineshaft. It is not ideal. But they are running out of time. “Just put them in,” Yakov says. “We’ll come back later and bury them.”

And I would think this a great mercy but for the sound of the cannons in the distance and the barking of a dog nearby.

stuck on the telegram she received this morning and the two dozen words that irrevocably altered her life: The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your fiancé, Hans Nowak, was killed in action in Amiens, France, on August 9.

is as though her mind was cleaved upon reading that telegram: one half eerily calm and the other disintegrating into myriad pieces that ricocheted inside her skull. But between these two halves a curtain was drawn, and Anna’s conscious mind was trapped on the still, quiet side, unable to process the horrific reality that Hans is dead.

A gentle, prodding poke. An acknowledgment of existence. Not so much a kick, but a greeting. Hans’s child saying hello. She gasped. The grenade fell from her hand.

Franziska Annalie Schanzkowska is blown backward into the wall, jagged bits of metal ripping into her temple, torso, and thighs.

here is what you, and all the others, fail to understand: there would be no legend without me. I am the one who stopped her from being a tragic little footnote in history. I kept Anastasia Romanov alive for decades. She needed me.

Can you see, then, why I persisted down this path? My fiancé dead. My body ruined. My child taken from me. You would have done the same thing in my position.

anything you’ve ever known that you become addicted to it. What little guilt you feel is assuaged when you see how desperately they want this fiction to be true. How badly they want their princess to be alive. So you let them take up your cause, to begin fighting your battles. Then, many years later, you wake up and realize it’s too late. You can’t back out now. Your only choice is to embrace the lie, to become it.

You have proven my point. I might have told the lie, but you perpetuated it with your irrational hope and your willing suspension of disbelief. Don’t you see? You are angry with me—not because I was desperate and broken and wanted more from my life, but because it was just so easy leading you to water. You wanted to believe that I was Anastasia.

am drawn more toward Anna Anderson than to the young grand duchess. And that’s why I wrote this novel in the end. Because there are two sides to this story: one shimmering with privilege and affluence and nobility, the other blunted by sorrow and privation and neglect. What we forget as a culture is that both stories are worthy of our attention.

But I like to think she is misunderstood. I believe there was so much more to her life and her motives than her detractors care to admit.

I wanted her to be Anastasia. Wanted it to the point where I was willing to believe almost anything.

As iron sharpens iron, so one friend sharpens another.