Anna

 

We had this woman at Dalldorf, claiming to be

the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia

plucked Deus ex machina from the bullets and blood of some cellar smack dab in the snowy far reaches of Nothing Good. 

We did  hydrotherapy there, but she'd gotten a head start,

either jumping or about to jump off of some bridge into the Landwehrkanal

as if she were Girl Rasputin, Queen of the Waves. 

She did this in springtime, holding a pink tulip and a volume of Pushkin.

Mornings, I'd bring her a bowl of oatmeal and my scorn,

setting it down hard on the tray, sounding like the crack of a rifle.

Anna Anderson, do try to eat some (I'd say), like the nonsense you spoon out

as ammunition for the Great Cannon of Bullshit for the credulous.

Dalldorf Asylum is gone now, and my job with it, dragging incontinents

to the toilet and fakers to the street outside when the administrators were 

otherwise occupied filing reports or fucking the mute up on seven. 

At night I used to tell her my suspicions about Anna, and cures, and treatments.

Now I am old, and Anna Anderson is gone, proven by modern techniques

to have simply been a loon and a manipulator. I go to her grave and

plunge a Russian Orthodox cross into the earth right where her heart should be,

but never was. Madness and murder were everywhere then. Anna used

crayons to draw those poor dead Romanovs, while there she sat, well fed,

celebrated, alive in the sun room, like a cat or a cockroach, immortal.

_________

for What's Going On? -- Character(s) In Action. 

Don't forget that this week's Word List is still "live" through Sunday. 

Music: Cafe Accordion Orchestra Ochi Chyornya