

  Sonya knows that Paul will be at dinner at this hour, either at home with his family or out with friends. As she hoped, Émile Rousseau, his bookkeeper and business manager, is working late and lets her inside when she rings.

  “Madame Jeannette—” he begins in a less than friendly tone of voice. And then he recognizes Sonya and clears his throat. “I beg your pardon, Sonya. My mind was on my ledger books. Monsieur Poiret isn’t here.”

  Sonya’s heart is racing. “Oh, how silly of me!” She wishes he hadn’t recognized her so quickly—but now she has the confirmation she needed. Paul knows about Zaneta—he knows Zaneta! He has known all along and he has kept this knowledge from Sonya.

  She would like to strangle Paul Poiret, to see him die a painful death. “I came to see if—” Her voice trails off as a couple more pieces of the picture fall into place. “I came to see if I could borrow—the evening bandeau I was working on the other day. The one with the aigrette made of spun glass.”

  She can see Émile’s mind working, trying to discern whether the name Jeannette had meant anything to Sonya. She wants to leave, as quickly as possible. She wishes she had never come out tonight—wishes now that she didn’t know. “But perhaps I’m deluding myself to believe that I can wear such an elegant thing without appearing ridiculous! I see now, Émile, that my idea was a mistaken one.”

  “But, au contraire, Sonya, I can picture you precisely in that headdress. If you’ll forgive my boldness in saying so, I believe it would be particularly stunning when worn with Monsieur Poiret’s midnight blue evening dress; the one with the empire waist and diaphanous sleeves. I predict there will be half a dozen new orders for the dress after you’ve worn it.” He pauses. “You are going somewhere special tonight?”

  “Yes,” she lies. “I’ve been invited to a rather grand soirée.”

  Sonya thinks, Why not take the dress and never bring it back? No matter that it’s one of the newest and most expensive models. She deserves her revenge—she deserves much more than this. What Paul owes her is incalculable.

  What a fool she had been, to believe his tale—to doubt the certainty of her intuition, from the very first moment he’d spoken to her at the Gare du Nord. Her certainty that he’d mistaken her for her twin.

  What was it, she wonders, about powerful men that makes them feel entitled to satisfy their urges, without the slightest bit of consideration for the wreckage they leave in their wake?

  Sonya can’t bear now to look backwards, at her own wake—to think about Baila. To think about Zaneta and Paul. To think about Asher! She tells herself she will deal with all these feelings later. Right now, she must look straight ahead.

  She smiles demurely at Émile Rousseau, a man whose probity she trusts. One of those rare trustworthy men. “If you really think he would approve the idea.”

  “I’ll just fetch the garments in question…”

  “No need, Émile. I’ll wrap them up myself and go home again to change. It wouldn’t do to show up at a Ballets Russes event with shopping bags, would it?”

  Kishinev

  1903

  Sonya was called into the shop by one of the new assistants she’d hired on her return from Paris. “It’s the priest’s girl,” said Ana.

  “She’s hardly a girl!”

  Ana shrugged. “I can’t very well say ‘the priest’s woman,’ Sonya Morisovna. It would sound quite improper.”

  Sonya smiled. She liked Ana. It was gratifying to have such competent, kind, and pleasant people working for her, especially now. She was expecting Asher to arrive home that night with new rolls of velvet from Turkey. Having grown up speaking Yiddish at home, unlike Sonya, he had proved himself very useful in the matters of these international buying expeditions. Thanks to his industry and hers, their shop was becoming known as the best place to buy coats and hats in Kishinev, for all the people of means, both Christians and Jews.

  It was Easter Sunday and the shop was officially closed, in accordance with the Christian laws. The rush of orders for the holiday had all been filled on time. Ana’s mother had allowed her to come in nonetheless after attending church. She was there to tidy up while Sonya balanced the account books and made an inventory of what they still needed to buy for the upcoming season.

  She made sure Naomi was comfortably settled with her scraps of pattern paper and the bright red box of chalk crayons sent from America by Lev and his wife for Naomi’s fifth birthday. Signaling her to be careful not to wake her baby sister, Sonya tucked the covers up around little Olga’s shoulders before stealing a glimpse at herself in the mirror.

  She was sure now—she’d missed two periods. She would tell Asher tonight. She knew he would be overjoyed. She looked at herself and thought, “Who are you?” And then she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and walked out through her sitting room into the shop.

  Her old schoolfriend, the priest’s housekeeper, appeared to be more than usually discomfited. “Please, Sonya…” She looked pointedly at Ana.

  “Could you give us a moment, dear?” As Ana put on her hat and coat and stepped outside, the little bell above the door rang merrily. “Whatever is it now, Masha?”

  Masha took a folded-up edition of the Bessarbets from her coat pocket and held the front page out for Sonya. The headline, in bold type, read Death to the Jews!

  Sonya read without touching it. “I’m always glad to see you, Masha. But did you really think it was necessary to disturb me in my work today with this—news? That rag of a paper is always publishing such hateful screeds.”

  Masha, because of her twisted spine, was almost a head shorter than Sonya. Still she managed to assume a pose that made her look of equal size. “The Holy Father received a visit this morning from Tchemzenkov.”

  “The police chief? What of it? He probably came to make confession.”

  “I assure you, Sonya, it was nothing so benign.” She lowered her voice. “They are planning an action against the Jews—a pogrom!”

  Sonya had grown up with frightening tales of the pogrom in Kiev on another Easter Sunday, in 1891, when she was still a little girl, close on the heels of the pandemic, when so many lives had been lost, including her own father’s life. Scores of men had been murdered, for no crime other than being Jews. Their wives and daughters were raped, their houses demolished, and children were torn screaming from their mothers’ arms.

  But that was all long ago. “Surely not, Masha! The mayor himself is a friend to the Jews of Kishinev. His wife is one of my customers.”

  “I listened at the door. Tchemzenkov urged the Holy Father, in so many words, to offer dispensation to any who commit acts of revenge today against the Jews.”

  Revenge! For a beautifully tailored coat made from the finest imported cashmere? For a silk hat that could be worn proudly by a grand duke?

  Sonya looked around the shop she and Asher had worked so hard to make into a lovely, welcoming place, filled with the tools of their trade. The gleaming, gilt-inscribed sewing machines and quilted taffeta dressmaker’s dummies from Paris. The hat blocks lined up on their shelf beneath the worktable. The silver scissors of many sizes hanging neatly on their hooks, and the scrolled irons on their racks above the fire in a newly built ceramic stove. Where the finest etched tea glasses, ensconced inside their silver filigree podstakannik, were always at the ready near the samovar. Where customers stood before the floor-length triptych mirror while one of the kneeling assistants made measurements and Sonya wrote them down. Asher often sat cross-legged on the table in the light from the shop window, doing the hand-sewing for which he’d achieved a degree of fame in the village where he came from and had been, along with his good nature and small fame as a boxer, the source of the matchmaker’s recommendation. Finished hats stood perched atop tall poles, and hundreds of spools of colored thread were on display in their glass-fronted cabinet like wildflowers on a hillside. Papier-mâché French-made hatboxes lined the upper shelves. The cutting tables were always kept meticulously clean and the stove had a fire burning in it day and night so that customers would never feel the cold.

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken. This is the twentieth century. The world has changed.”

  “You are one of the very few people in Kishinev, Sonya Morisovna, who has ever been kind to me. And I have kept from you the terrible things I have overheard people say…”

  “Well then?”

  “I will not allow you and your children to be slaughtered like lambs!” She pulled a ring of keys from her pocket and shook it so that the many keys rattled. “You mustn’t stay here. They are planning to smash all the Jewish shops—and as many Jewish heads as they can find.”

  “Hush! You’ll lose your post—and then what will you do?”

  Masha came up close to her, so close that Sonya could smell the garlic on her breath and a faint whiff of the tobacco Masha was in the habit of stealing from the priest’s study. “He’s fond of you, Sonya. He told me once that the attic of the church would be a good place to hide, if your family was ever in danger.”

  Sonya was about to speak when a very singular sound reached their ears, above the sound of a passing cart and the distant sounds of singing or shouting—it was hard to tell which. Exploding suddenly in the air, there was the noise of breaking glass.

  “Hurry, Sonyuschka—it’s begun! Rouse your daughters! Take their coats and some quilts.” Masha was holding her head in both hands. “No—leave the quilts. I’ll bring them to you later.”

  It was shouting, not singing—Sonya could hear it clearly now. She flinched as if she’d just been stuck with a pin when another crash of breaking glass reached her ears. “What about Asher? He’s not coming till tonight.”

  “Leave a message for him, somewhere—but don’t, for the love of God, leave word about where you’ve gone. Hurry!”

  Sonya’s hands were shaking so badly, she could hardly hold the piece of chalk. She couldn’t think what to write. Finally, she wrote, We’re safe. She couldn’t think what else to say without compromising Masha. And then she made a cross, the Russian cross, at the bottom of the note she committed to a remnant of black cloth left over from a mourning coat they were making for the baker’s wife, who was newly widowed. Later she thought what an unlucky choice that had been—and even whether it meant that she herself was to blame for what happened afterwards.

  

  With some water and food Masha smuggled to them—with their quilts and a chamber pot tucked under the eaves—Sonya and her daughters hunkered down in the attic of the church, in the smell of dust and mice, waiting until Masha came to tell them it was over.

  Would it never be over? Sonya ran out of stories to tell her children. Her voice grew hoarse from singing the same bedtime songs over and over again. While her daughters slept, she hovered as close to the window as she dared, looking out at the horrors unfolding far below.

  Her gratitude for this place of safety was mixed with a bitter taste of guilt, worrying about her Jewish neighbors and friends. Worrying about Asher. Praying he had also found a place to shelter.

  Her nerves were so frayed that she spanked Olga when she wouldn’t stop crying. Naomi, horrified, demanded to see her papa. Sonya wished for him then, wished that he were there with them—that she didn’t have to face this alone with their two little ones.

  Would the rioters wrest the truth from Masha—and come for them in the attic of the church? How long would they be locked up here? What if Masha failed to come again with more food and water? What of Ana and the other assistant? Would they run home to their parents? Were their parents part of the mob? Had Sonya herself, through her own guilt and dread, somehow made this happen?

  She held her children close and vowed to be a better person, a better wife and mother—to be worthy of the blessings God had given her. How she wished she could turn the hands of the clock backwards and undo what she had done, so thoughtlessly and recklessly, in Paris.

  Dawn was just breaking on the third day when Sonya heard Masha’s whistle from the stairway. She roused the children and put their coats on. Masha peeked in and whispered, “Come quickly.” And then she led them down the stairs and out the little door onto the alley, urging them to hurry away as swiftly as possible.

  Sonya held Olga tight and led Naomi by the hand. Looking first to the right and then the left, making sure no one saw them, she walked out onto the boulevard, telling her daughters they’d see their papa soon.

  All the shops and houses owned by Jews had smashed windows. The pharmacy, where Jascha had once worked at a lab bench behind the counter, had anti-Jewish slogans painted on the jagged edges of what was left of its plate-glass windows. Her heart beating fast, Sonya walked gingerly, finding a path for herself and her children through the shards of broken glass that seemed to have brought the blue sky down to the ground.

  Furniture that had never seen the light of day was strewn over the sidewalks, tipping over into the gutters. Cushions and pillows had been slashed open. The sun shone through a haze of horsehair and goose feathers. Eiderdown clung so thickly to the trees that it seemed as if the branches were coated in hoarfrost. The acrid smoke from gilded picture-frames and scorched family photos mingled in the air with the ashes of beautifully printed books and scrolls. There were parti-colored broken bottles and jars under the street-lamp where Jascha had kissed her, on that winter night, so long ago.

  Sonya tried not to make eye contact with the policemen who were hosing blood off the sidewalks, into the gutters. How many of her friends and neighbors had been wounded? She prayed to be allowed to find Asher, whole and unharmed, waiting for them at the shop. She hoped the shop itself had withstood the mob, perhaps even, somehow, escaped their notice. The sound of weeping and wailing came from the cavernous windows. Seemed to come from the skies themselves.

  And then they walked past the courtyard of a building that had once been a small, Jewish-owned furniture factory. Instead of furniture, the workshop was filled now with the bodies of men, women, and children, laid out on blankets on the floor. They were only partly covered by the bed-linens draped over them as makeshift shrouds. The marble-white faces that showed were contorted with looks of horror. Their heads were bruised and bloodied, their broken limbs stuck out at odd angles.

  Hardly able to breathe, Sonya rushed the children past, hoping they hadn’t seen what she had seen, in a glimpse: Asher. Oh, the look on his face! She held Olga tight and gave Naomi a shove, directing her gaze up to the trees. “Look at the branches, child,” she said, her voice quavering. “The feathers—it looks as if it has snowed.”

  He was dead. Asher was dead. It couldn’t be!

  The windows of their shop had been reduced to bright shards on the cobblestones outside their door. The threshold was stained with blood. Sonya recoiled from it, whimpering, knowing that it was her husband’s blood.

  In an instant she understood that he had tried to stand up against the mob, to defend what was theirs—his fists against their crowbars and cudgels. His death a testament to the fierceness of the love he felt for her and their children, and a wish to be her hero. How foolish she’d been to think he’d be there, safe and sound, waiting for them. How horrible she’d been to abandon him in his danger, only thinking about herself and the girls. But that was always her way, wasn’t it? Always thinking about herself, as she’d done in Paris.

  Her guilt was intermingled with the realization that she was, at twenty-three, a widow now. A widow with two young children and another on the way. She’d been harboring the news of her pregnancy for him, the hope that she would, this time, give him a son. She had prayed it would be his son.

  Never in her entire life had she felt such despair and such a sense of self-loathing. The little bell above the door was hanging at an angle, like a songbird caught in some netting and left to die.

  The morning sun shone through the gaping windows, but Sonya was shivering so hard that her teeth chattered.

  Everything was in ruin—the mirrors smashed, the furniture ravaged as if attacked by wolves. Every time she pressed her hands against her eyes, trying to staunch the flood of tears, she would see Asher’s winsome smile and the way he’d so often looked at her, his eyes filled with gratitude and love. She hadn’t deserved him. He wouldn’t have loved her if he’d seen who she really was.

  What would become of her and her daughters—and this baby growing inside her? Where could they turn?

  Her sewing machines, dented and cudgeled, were sunken into their cabinets, separated from their treadles. Unwound spools of thread and bobbins, multi-colored tangles of bias tape, and crumpled pieces of pattern paper were scattered everywhere.

  Who were these people—these neighbors and merchants, these men she’d wished good-day, who’d tipped their cap to her and tousled Olga’s curls? Who were these monsters who had murdered her husband and left her children without a father? Destroyed their shop, leaving Sonya and her children without a home.

  The glass in the frames that held their family photographs was shattered. The photographs had been ripped into pieces, along with all the leather-bound books that had filled their shelves. Asher’s books!

  What could cause people—the normal, everyday people of Kishinev—to suddenly turn so hateful? What had she and Asher ever done to offend them? Hadn’t she always been a good neighbor and friend? Wasn’t her shop always a lovely, welcoming place, where Jews and Christians alike drank glasses of tea while Sonya confected beautiful clothing and hats for them? Hadn’t the mayor’s wife, delighted with her new cloak, kissed Sonya’s cheeks and told her that she was one of Kishinev’s treasures?

  She bent down and picked up a pair of Asher’s glasses, crushed by someone’s boot. Close to her ear, she heard Olga murmur, “Papa!”

  The curtains were hanging in tatters from the broken windows. The beasts had ripped her fine linens from the beds and used her dressmaking sheers to slash the mattresses open. One pair of sheers, engraved with her name—a gift from her mother—was left on the floor, the two halves wrested apart. There were goose-down feathers everywhere.