Free City of Shadows by Ariana Franklin

sunny dust scented by the avenue’s flowering lime trees. Below, a woman waited for her dog to finish sniffing a tree trunk while she chatted across the road to the bookseller washing down his shop door. A family of father, mother, and two children, prayer books in hand, was on its way to church.
    So bourgeois, she thought, so safe. In Moabit you were never safe; people lived too close to the border between survival and starvation. Since the advent of the Brownshirts, there was no protection either from a jackbooted invasion that left broken heads and windows in its wake.
    But here ...she thanked God for the German middle class. No bears here. They’d never get past Frau Schinkel.
    And there’d been at least one good thing from last night: she carried a healing memory of the concerned eyes of the policeman who’d sat beside her on the stairs. A stranger, a man whose name she didn’t
    know, but kind. She wished she hadn’t had to lie to him.
    As she turned to go back into the living room, her head exploded.
    By now she’d disciplined herself not to crawl on the floor when the noise and pictures started up, but her hands gripped at her knees to try to stop her shaking. She couldn’t hear anything through the crack of gunfire. Time unraveled the pogroms into bits of chaos; one jigsaw piece illuminated dear dead faces, another showed Jews running the gauntlet of rifle butts.
    She watched a rabbi’s hat fly from his head, saw him stoop under the blows to pick it up and then continue the run. It is forbidden to bare the head before the Lord.
    She held on to that picture as she groped her way to a chair; it always steadied her.
    When it was over, she was left panting and resentful. Goddamn it, she’d been getting better; it had been weeks since the last one. The at tack on the stairs last night had resurrected an older terror.
    For Esther, memory was the devil horned and stinking; she fought it with the desperation of an old-time saint saving his soul in case re membering destroyed her own. She’d seen what it could do to émigrés who’d suffered, keeping raped women in a depression they couldn’t es cape, inflicting apathy on the old whose losses had been too great to bear, collapsing the nerve of others so that even a loudly ticking clock was reminiscent of a rifle being cocked—oh, God, she knew that fear. She saw it in Anna; memories could attach themselves to you like ten tacles sucking away present sunlight, leaving you blundering forever in the grayness of the past.
    The bastard, she thought. I’m not letting him resurrect all that. I’m going to forget him. He’s gone. We’re safe now.
    In the evening Nick came by to see how they were settling in, still playing cloak-and-dagger games. “I parked around the corner, made sure I wasn’t followed. Where’s Her Imperial Highness?”
    “Anna’s asleep. She’s still groggy.”
    “She like the flat? Good, huh?”
    “Very nice.”
    “Definitely is,” he said. “Cheka assassins won’t find her here.”
    One thing about Nick, Esther thought, the tentacles of memory couldn’t suck anything out of his hide. Automatically, tonelessly she said, “It was a bloody burglar.”
    “Wake up, kid, it was Bolshies wanting to get her. Who’s out to bump off all the leading White émigrés? Who gunned down Petrovich in Paris the other day?”
    “You said it was because Petrovich had been supplying weapons to the White Army.”
    “Sure. He was.”
    “I don’t see Anna as an arms dealer.”
    “But who’ll the White Army put on the imperial throne when it wins Russia back?” He sat down on the sofa and clasped his hands behind his head, luxuriating in the pleasure of it. “I tell you, our Anna’s proba bly on the Reds’ hit list. Top of it, maybe.” He closed his eyes in joy. “If the Cheka is out to get her, she is Anastasia, pure and simple. I’m legal. I’m completely helping the rightful heir to the throne.”
    “Yes,” a calm voice said, “the