Paul and the nanny both burst out laughing.

  Jeannette, overcome with a sense of humiliation, feels herself start to sweat. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she says to the child. Looking at the nanny, head to toe, she says icily, “Miss O’Reilly.”

  She can’t stop thinking about that last child Paul had planted in her. Her third pregnancy, all in all. She knows she’s lucky to still be alive. She knew two dancers who died from botched abortions, and one—though made an honest woman by her patron—who died in childbirth. Rumor was that the baby was sent to an orphanage.

  Mothers were never happy when their sons married dancers. Paul had been about to introduce Jeannette to his mother once. But then, at the last moment, he changed his plans. Too frightened, she’d guessed. It was just about the time he asked his mother to lend him 50,000 francs.

  Jeannette entertains the possibility that Paul doesn’t know about the little girl she saw in the dressing room. It makes her insides ache, thinking about the tenderness with which that child had caressed her mother’s hand, bringing her round again—and the joy and ardor in the eyes of the Russian seamstress as she looked up at Jeannette. How it had been like discovering a mirror that showed a version of her face much kinder than the one she saw every day.

  She looks at Paul without the scrim of love she’s felt for him since they were both in their teens. How stout he’s grown! Was he always such a cad? She gathers up her cloak and hat. She forgets her umbrella.

  “Goodbye, goodbye!” says little Rosine, happy that she will have her father to herself, at least for a few precious moments.

  “Yes, thank you for coming by, madame,” says Paul, all businesslike. “We will, of course, be delighted to have you as part of the cast for our soirée—won’t we, my pet?”

  “Oh yes, Papa!” the child chimes in.

  Without even bothering to answer or say goodbye, Jeannette heads out the door. Too late, she remembers that it’s raining—and realizes that she’s left her umbrella behind. She doesn’t want to go back inside that house or ever to see Paul Poiret again.

  There’s something that she does want—although she can’t find the words yet to express what it is. Ignoring the rain, she strides toward rue de Penthièvre with her head pounding and a sense of hollowness inside her that isn’t only hunger.

  

  Despite the rain, Jeannette walks all the way from the Poirets’ house to the Opéra Garnier, arriving with her clothes soaked through, her stockings slipping inside the ill-fitting, ugly shoes. She knows it’s too early for anyone but the stage crew to be there. But still, she reasons, they’ll let her in and she’ll be able to wait. She hopes the heat is on.

  It would be unbearable to wait at home now.

  She knows she should go home, change her clothes and rest until the pre-performance class convenes. She should eat. But she can’t stand the idea of seeing her little apartment now, with its inescapable sense of belonging to someone who belongs to no one. Reflexively, she climbs the metal staircase to the dressing-room, hoping the rain hasn’t brought in rats—actual rats, as it sometimes did—then plunks herself down onto one of the rickety chairs.

  Her clothes and hair are dripping—and she’s cold. She unbuckles and shakes off the shoes, peeling off her stockings, stripping down to her poor, misshapen, much-abused bare feet. She always tries to keep them hidden out of view—the overlong first toe with its nail hideously thickened and perpetually black from the daily assault of her weight bearing down on it, through the tips of her toe-shoes. Her other toenails as often as not missing. The bunions, bruises, and corns that make her naked feet look as if they belonged to an old woman. En pointe, her slender ankles and chiseled calves crisscrossed in pink silk ribbons—bathed in stage lights—fairylike. Beautiful, or so she is regularly told. She has kept her secret ugliness well hidden from the world.

  The mirror shows her the only rat in the room—herself. How ghastly she looks, like a bedraggled puppy! She pushes a dripping hank of hair behind her ear, ashamed in a way she’s rarely been before her own reflection, which seems changed somehow. Foreign.

  Reaching out, she touches the image of her hand, fingertips to fingertips. There are tears in the other’s eyes, the lips form a tender smile—and something starts to feel unhinged inside her.

  The voice from the doorway—accented, Russian, girlish—takes her by surprise. “It’s absolutely incredible, isn’t it?” Tamara Karsavina is standing in the hall, looking just as beautiful as she does in her publicity photos. She radiates a positively grotesque degree of joy. “Mademoiselle Jeannette, I’ve been searching for you everywhere!” She floats in and sits down in the chair next to the one where Jeannette is seated, her feet tucked under her skirt. “But you are shivering! Here,” she says, pulling an embroidered shawl and a pair of soft woolen stockings out of her dance bag. With a flick of her wrists, she drapes the shawl over Jeannette’s shoulders and presses the socks into her hands.

  Jeannette is dumbstruck. “You—searching for me?”

  Tamara Karsavina is the new darling of the Saison Russe, even though it’s Pavlova who’s featured on the poster. Pavlova who, or so rumor has it, couldn’t be bothered to show up for the first two weeks of Diaghilev’s Russian Season. And maybe that was why the older ballerina was now in such a foul mood, while le tout Paris went mad for Karsavina. Jeannette couldn’t be more flustered if the queen of Spain had just walked in and handed her a pair of socks.

  “Sonya told me what happened! How you found each other, in the doorway of Pavlova’s dressing-room.” In response to Jeannette’s look of confusion, Karsavina adds, “Sonya—Pavlova’s seamstress.”

  Jeannette shivers again, feeling chilled in every part of her.

  “Here, put on the socks. Oh, your poor feet!”

  Jeannette remembers again that she forgot to eat today. She left a little bowl of stewed lentils on her counter, meaning to have them for lunch.

  She actually doesn’t want to hear whatever it is that Karsavina is about to tell her. The room seems to be listing, like the little boat Paul used, in the old days, to ferry the two of them down the river to his little hideaway at Meudon. How they laughed on those Mondays, when there were no classes and his shop was closed! They feasted and made love all day and night, till Tuesday dawned. She wonders, did he take Sonya there as well? Was that where the child was conceived?

  Jeannette feels Karsavina’s large dark eyes trying to see inside her—and braces herself when it’s clear that she’s decided to speak. “She is your sister, ma belle—your twin!”

  The words are no sooner spoken than Jeannette is suffused with a guilty sense that she’s always known she had a twin—that she is one of two. Rossetti’s gaudy painting flashes before her eyes again—the look of shock in the eyes of those two sets of identical twins, male and female, encountering one another in the forest. Jeannette had instinctively understood the outrage emanating from the eyes of the two young women in the painting. Now she understands why—and, horribly, why Paul had particularly wanted to show it to her.

  What do any of us have but the uniqueness of ourselves? Why would anyone rejoice to discover a second self—unmoored from one’s own identity—taking up space that is rightfully ours in the world? A twin! But the idea is, of course, absurd. Jeannette’s maman, who loved her so mightily and often said how devoutly she’d prayed and hoped for her arrival, would never in a thousand years have given birth to twins and then given one of them away.

  “I have no sister!” Jeannette says in a much nastier tone than she would ever have thought possible in speaking to such an exalted personage as Tamara Karsavina. Her heartbeat is throbbing in her ears. Looking down and seeing her own bare feet, she frowns.

  “Oh, do put the stockings on, please! They’re very soft wool—cashmere, I believe. Don’t be ashamed. What ballerina doesn’t have hideous feet? You should see Pavlova’s!”

  Jeannette bends to pull the stockings on. She owned many such fine things, before she ran away from home. Before the years and years of being so terribly poor. She has a few such things still—gifts from Paul or other admirers.

  “Wait here,” the younger dancer says. Then, “No—it’s too cold here.” She takes a fistful of coins out of her little pigskin purse. “Wait at the Café de la Paix. Inside, in the grand salon. I will bring her to you.”

  Jeannette catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. “I couldn’t possibly meet anyone now. Another day, maybe…”

  Karsavina stares at Jeannette, cocking her head, then laughs again. “You look so amazingly like her. Those are the same eyes I first saw through her little shop window on Zagorodny Prospekt, on my walks home from school. Sonya’s eyes!”

  Jeannette has never before had a parallel sense of being looked at, but not being seen.

  Karsavina places the coins into Jeannette’s hand, wrapping her fingers around them. “Promise me you won’t run away. That you’ll be at the Café de la Paix at one o’clock on Thursday afternoon.”

  Jeannette understands well enough Karsavina’s power over her and every other member of the corps. One whispered word from the company’s bright new star, and Jeannette would lose her job in a heartbeat. She bites her lip then says, “As you wish, mademoiselle.”

  “You mustn’t look so glum!” Karsavina says with a laugh. “Sonya has been searching for you for years and years—and wants nothing more than to shower you with love.”

  Jeannette blinks her eyes once then twice before she can speak. “Can you tell me? Is it true that Pavlova’s seamstress is a Jewess?”

  “Of course, my dear! But then why should you have known?”

  Jeannette and Paul had an ongoing, sometimes bitter argument over the years about her stance as an anti-Dreyfusard. “Think hard, you ignorant flea!” he’d said to her more than once. But she couldn’t help how she felt, could she? Jeannette had been raised to hate and fear the Jews. Had Paul known all along? Did other people know? Could that have been what her aunt meant when she spoke about Jeannette’s blood—about being “one of them”?

  “So pretty,” rhapsodized Karsavina, “just like you. And so good and kind. She has three children—three nieces for you!” The newly minted prima ballerina is overflowing with her own romantic feelings about life. “It can only be, for all of you, a joyful reunion!”

  Jeannette feels herself falling, as if she had stepped off a cliff, and a dizziness that makes her close her eyes. She remembers the change she noted in the way Paul looked at her, some years ago. How many years ago? She’d wondered then if he was noticing how much less radiant her skin was than it had been when they’d first met, when she was only sixteen, when he so often told her that her skin was as smooth as the most expensive Chinese silk. She’d wondered if he’d found someone younger, fresher, more to his liking. And why wouldn’t he?

  Sonya. The name is oddly, deeply familiar to her. All at once, Jeannette knows that she’s heard Paul murmur that name before, when they were both sated and half asleep. It had meant nothing to her at the time beyond the usual anguish of knowing that he had other women. So many women in the life of Paul Poiret! Models, midinettes, dressmakers. A fleet of terrifying saleswomen and all those exceedingly rich, imperious clients of his—although he never called them by their Christian names! Lovers, too, without doubt. She knew it all along but chose not to think about it. Not too often.

  She’d nursed the dream, up until the very day of his wedding, that she was the only woman who really mattered to Paul. His first love from the moment of their first kiss, that day at the Folies-Bergère, just weeks before she won the audition to join the Opera Ballet.

  Even after he married Denise Boulet—surprising everyone with his odd choice, this unknown, unpolished and not even very pretty nineteen-year-old dredged up from his past—he’d been convincing in the very special feelings he harbored for Jeannette. And, after all, he continued to help her in countless ways. When that bright light of his was shining on her, bathing her in lustful adoration, she simply took it in with gratitude—love. A ferocity of love she hadn’t felt since her mother died and it came to seem that no one would ever really love her again—not with such hunger.

  That pretty little girl in Pavlova’s dressing-room, with her broad forehead and the impish gleam in her warm brown eyes, was so clearly Paul’s. The child’s look of unconditional love for Sonya exactly resembled the way Paul used to look at Jeannette. It strikes her that she’s been sharing that look of Paul’s—that special look, reserved only for her—all this time.

  She never knew what Paul was thinking. He used to scrutinize her with the minutest attention, feeling her with his thick yet sensitive fingers, as if she were a piece of sculpture. Seeming to memorize the shape, breadth, and depth of every part of her, as if planning to re-create her in some other medium—marble or wood or stone. Was it because he’d been comparing the two of them all that while?

  “It must be a lot to take in,” says Karsavina, startling Jeannette out of her reverie. The ballerina kisses her three times, in the exact same way Jeannette has seen the Ballets Russes dancers kissing each other. She has been drawn to the warmth of the Russian ballerinas, which seems to go so well with their passionate approach to their art. “You won’t forget, will you?”

  “One o’clock on Thursday, at the Café de la Paix,” Jeannette says in the dutiful voice she’d used with the nuns. A voice inside her is saying that it isn’t so, it can’t be possible—and another voice inside her, a much grimmer voice, answers back, “But it explains so much, don’t you see?”

  Saint Petersburg

  1903-1904

  Living with Daniel and Klara, with her children surrounded by their children, it was almost possible for Sonya to imagine that her past belonged to someone else’s life—not hers, that nightmare; not hers, that sense of guilt, anger, and sorrow.

  The government, fearing international exposure, held its trials of the murderers and looters behind closed doors. Daniel and his colleagues in the capital rallied to win compensation for the losses suffered by the Jews of Kishinev.

  They were, for a while, hopeful. But then the tsar himself launched a campaign to blame the Jews of Kishinev for what had befallen them. There was blame on both sides, he told the international press—to the horror of Jewish people everywhere. There would be no compensation forthcoming for the lost lives, the lost homes, the ruined livelihoods. The Jews had been compensated well enough, said the tsar, by the donations sent in by their sympathizers and co-religionists from around the world.

  Sonya received nothing.

  How had it all disappeared in just a matter of days? Her home, her husband, the family business—everything she’d so naively assumed would last forever. She felt like one of the walking dead, going through the motions of being a mother, a sister, an aunt. Her food tasted like ashes.

  Daniel’s family took pains to organize activities and amusements for Olga and Naomi, who day by day seemed to forget they’d ever had a father—or had ever lived anywhere but Saint Petersburg. Naomi loved playing with her big girl cousins, who petted and spoiled her. But every once in a while, she would get a stricken look in her eyes and say, “When will Papa come back to us?” Sonya would distract her by putting the child’s hands on her belly to feel her baby brother kick.

  Little Olga spent every unsupervised moment in her uncle’s library. They all said with amusement that she was “looking” at the books. One day, at breakfast, she gave all of them a shock by reading out the headline of Daniel’s newspaper. “It’s not such a great surprise,” he said, with a wistful look at his own children, none of whom had shown any particular genius. “I myself was also a very early reader.”

  Attended by her sister-in-law and a midwife, Sonya gave birth in October to a healthy baby girl. She wept because Asher’s dream of a son would never come true now—and because this girl would never have a father, at least not one who could ever claim her.

  The baby’s name was chosen by Daniel, in honor of a long-dead great aunt on their father’s side. As soon as Baila was weaned, Sonya begged Daniel to lend her enough money to buy a new sewing machine, rent a storefront, and start over again.

  “I saw a place with a sign on it, on Zagorodny Prospekt,” she told him before he left for work one morning. “It’s very small, but the light is good.”

  “But we love having you here, Sonya. You and the children.”

  “It’s just one room—and there’s no apartment attached to it. We would continue to live here, until—” Her voice trailed off, as it so often did, these days.

  “Of course,” said Daniel, as if he knew what she was thinking but didn’t say, out of delicacy.

  Sonya had overheard her brother and sister-in-law discussing men they thought might suit her, when her mourning was over—all of them widowers, with children of their own.

  

  Sonya gave some of her earnings every month to Daniel, determined to pay him back as soon as possible. The rest, she put into a travel fund. She hated being in debt to her brother. She hated thinking that her daughters would come to see themselves as impoverished relatives in an otherwise prosperous family—or that she would school them, through her example, that the only path to success, for a woman, involved marriage.

  She needed some way to make her shop stand out in Saint Petersburg, where all the fashionable ladies wanted to wear Parisian designs.

  In 1904, she wrote a letter to Paul Poiret, whose new maison du couture on rue Pasquier was winning him fame as far away as the Russian capital. Sonya would be glad for the work, she told him, if he needed extra help in his atelier. She said nothing about Baila’s birth—and offered no explanation about why she was now living in Saint Petersburg. She only told him that she hoped, eventually, to move with her children to Paris.