Comrade Phlegmenkoff
As St. Petersburg thunders in uproar over the latest news in France – ROMANOV PRINCESS FOUND, the headlines read – Comrade Phlegmenkoff sits on a ratty old chair in front of a dilapidated orphanage and thinks of the girl she remembers only in snapshot moments: little Anya, who'd turned up the night of the revolution without a past and without a name, her entire family – this she knows only now – shorn through by bullets.
Her first impression had been of a dangerous cretin in mockingly expensive clothes and well-fed face, russet hair glazed with ice. Eyes, an impertinent, majestic blue. In the paper, Grand Duchess Anastasia stands, shimmers as though powdered with golden dust, head held high, eyes still as clear as the cloudless sky, testament to the comrade's failure to flay nobility out of her like fat off her bones.
Two girls in threadbare dresses tiptoe past her, their desires simple like sightless eyes. Anya had been different, unafraid to want beyond what her station warranted, given to exaggeration and daydreaming (one zillion stars!).
The article included words from Her Grace's own lips, badly translated from French – comrade didn't know Anya even knew French, if she'd picked up the language like one of her many mongrels or if she'd always known it, blanketed by amnesia – her speech was unerringly polite, if insidiously incriminating as any homegrown waif's, any streetrat's, as it unfolded the tale of her odyssey. As comrade sees it, the journey had been perilous at best, rotten with accidents, threaded by adventure. Imperious, overbearing little Anya had survived and, surprisingly, her companions did as well.
Comrade Phlegmenkoff could imagine what they put up with: the ferocious greed of a lost princess, the melancholic – almost broody - silences, the sicksweet and haunting lullabies about december.