“And yet he made two of them.” Jeannette shakes her head at Sonya. Keeps shaking it until the smile fades from Sonya’s lips.

  The waiter appears. “Are you ready to order, mesdames?” he says, looking from one to the other of them like someone watching a tennis match.

  “The plat du jour,” Jeannette says, “for each of us.”

  Sonya is glad to surrender the menu. She can’t stop thinking about what Jeannette has just told her—and what it means about Paul’s treachery. How many layers must be pulled away until she finds the full truth of what he did to her—to them? Cutting short this bitter train of thought, she falls back upon the words she’d decided to say as she cogitated, long and hard, about this moment that has finally arrived.

  “I am sometimes able to remember,” she says, “although the memory always seems more like a dream. There is another small person sitting close to me, shoulder to shoulder. We are laughing. And then there are voices, loud voices laughing, all around us—and we are crying. And then—”

  She pauses, trying to read the effect of her words on Jeannette’s face. But the face is impenetrable. It’s the theater training, Sonya thinks. They learn to hide their feelings. Pavlova has told her about it. They have to, so that they can become someone else on stage. Whatever role is required of them. It’s like a magic trick. It’s a skill, like lining a lapel with interfacing to make it lie flat along the curves of the body.

  “Does the name Zaneta mean anything to you?”

  Barely perceptibly, Jeannette shakes her head no.

  Sonya repeats the question in Russian.

  Jeannette’s posture is perfect—but she holds herself even more erect now, like a queen on a throne. “You’ve made a mistake,” she says. “I am Jeannette Dupres, a Frenchwoman. My father works—worked,” she adds softly, remembering that, of course, her father is dead now, “for the Bureau de Change in Nantes.”

  Sonya gazes into Zaneta’s eyes. Never have a stranger’s eyes seemed so familiar to her. She longs to embrace this embodiment of what was, for so long, only an idea—to enfold Jeannette in her arms and hold on tight. To burst into tears. But she knows she must resist these feelings, however much they tug at her. She knows she mustn’t say or do anything that might cause Jeannette to run away.

  She smiles kindly. She is careful not to take an offensive or patronizing tone when she speaks. “You started life as Zaneta, one of two twin girls born to Nadia and Morris Luria, master tailors of Kishinev.”

  “You’ve made a mistake,” Jeannette repeats.

  “Our father was a political activist of sorts but never a violent man. He was an idealist and something of a dreamer. He no doubt dreamed of overthrowing the tsar and bringing a new order to Russia—and of justice for the Jews. But he was arrested on the very day we were born. Taken away and imprisoned for almost ten years.”

  It suddenly seems impossible to communicate everything she wants to say. How can she convey the feelings of her first ten years, growing up with stories instead of a father? And then the shock of that stranger, gentle and broken, coming into her life. Looking at her with love. Who appeared only to disappear again.

  “He came back to us in the year of the flu pandemic of 1890…” Sonya’s voice trails off. She’s overcome by the absurdity of giving all these details to Jeannette, all at once. How could she possibly take them in? “Should I stop for now? Perhaps we should eat something first.”

  Jeannette closes her eyes, blocking out the sight of Sonya’s face. “Go on,” she says, like someone bracing herself for a slap. “Get it over with.”

  This is not at all what Sonya had imagined. She takes a deep breath, using this opportunity to inspect her sister’s face in a way she hadn’t dared to before. Jeannette is wearing rouge and powder, although it has been so expertly and subtly applied as to be nearly invisible. There are very faint crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.

  Sonya suddenly wishes she could look at their two faces, side by side, in a mirror. She wishes that they could stand naked, side by side, before a mirror. She decides to withhold, for now, the sad story of how their father, weakened by his years in prison, succumbed to the flu. “After Papa’s arrest, Mother struggled to support us and our siblings—”

  Jeannette’s eyes pop open. “Siblings?”

  Sonya smiles tenderly. “Lev, who lives in New York now, with his wife and children, a boy and a girl. Faya—” She doesn’t want to say yet that Faya died last year. “An older sister, Faya. And Daniel—” She has already written to Daniel, although she has not yet posted the letter. “Daniel is one of a small number of Jewish lawyers in Saint Petersburg, by dint of his brilliant mind, his discipline, and persistence. Daniel was our mother’s pride.”

  “Was?”

  Sonya looks down at the soup the waiter has placed before her. It smells delicious. She takes a sip of her champagne. She can’t help wondering how much this meal is going to cost them. Probably more than she spends in a week to feed herself and her children.

  “Mother tried her best to take care of us—but without Papa there, working with her, it was impossible. She didn’t want us to starve.”

  Jeannette understands this word and what it means—and what it means to go from plenty to privation. What it means to make decisions one would not ordinarily make, if things hadn’t been so dire. She thinks of the men, the patrons, whose greatest recommendations were often the meals they provided. Even now, food is such a potent symbol for her. Dancers need to eat. Dancers are always hungry.

  “Our mother was a brave and a marvelous person. I adored her. The orphanage,” says Sonya with a look of sorrow in her eyes, “was meant to be a temporary measure.”

  This isn’t happening, Jeannette tells herself. I’m dreaming. I’ll wake up soon.

  “We’d been there for less than a year when the regular matron was away and her assistant met with a French couple who’d come all the way to Kishinev, for a reason still unknown, to adopt a baby girl. One baby girl.” She pauses. “Perhaps, Jeannette, you can explain.”

  It is all, Jeannette thinks, as weird as an opium dream. She hasn’t gone to one of the dens since Paul dropped her. But still! She pinches her thigh through the silken folds of the skirt that is precisely like Sonya’s. Is magenta also her favorite color? Closing her eyes again, she expects to see Paul when she opens them—Paul sprawled out on a chaise longue across the room, smiling lasciviously at her through a fragrant haze of smoke.

  But her thigh hurts where she pinched it. It will probably leave a bruise. She’s here, in the grand salon of the Café de la Paix—and yet it’s as if she were sitting at a dressing table, before a mirror. A mirror that has softened and rounded her and filled her face with an expression she herself has never seen there. Maybe Paul has seen it—of course, Paul had seen that look of love Jeannette sees now in Sonya’s face. Jeannette had loved him. For years and years, she’d loved him.

  “Explain? But none of this makes any sense.”

  “You were adopted,” Sonya says. “You were adopted by the French couple—and taken away. It broke our mother’s heart. It left,” she adds, “a huge hole in my heart.” She smiles that same radiant smile Jeannette saw in Pavlova’s dressing room, when Sonya looked up at her from the floor. “And yet, my long-lost other self, here you are!”

  Jeannette has enshrined the first eight years of her childhood as the beginning and end of all happiness, until she met Paul. Years of feeling loved and treasured, until her mother died. And then the overwhelming coldness of that loss. The grief that was only ever staunched by shutting off her thoughts and living in her body—making her body a means of transportation away from the sorrow of being her lonely, abandoned self. No one outside the dance world ever came close to understanding how the physical pain of working so hard and so constantly, always pushing herself, was the only thing that ever stood between Jeannette and despair. Paul had brought his bright light into the darkness often enough to make her feel loved or at least lovable. But the darkness was always there, waiting to swallow her. “My beloved mother died,” she informs Sonya, “when I was eight years old.”

  “Our mother,” says Sonya, as if she hadn’t heard—as if she were refusing to hear her, “died when I—when you and I were eighteen. I grew up believing, up until she told me otherwise, at the very end, that I had a twin who was stillborn. That you never lived to see the light of day.”

  Without betraying any emotion, Jeannette has gone very pale. To think there was a mother—a second mother—who had still been alive for ten years after her own mother died! Who might have loved her. She feels cheated, yet another time, by life—by this person who had a mother until she was eighteen, and enjoyed her love. Who was part of a family that loved and accepted her. Who hadn’t been abandoned, as Jeannette had been, as an undefended little girl of eight. Left alone with her monstrous aunt while her father worked and worked and hardly ever spent any time with her—who seemed to do everything he could to avoid spending time with her.

  Sonya reaches across the round table, taking her sister’s hand. “You’re so cold!”

  Jeannette tries to pull her hand away, but Sonya hangs onto it. “I only found out—from Daniel, after Mother died—about our time in the orphanage. And that you might actually still be alive, somewhere in France.” She puts her other hand on top of Jeannette’s, leaning toward her. She can smell scent on Jeannette’s skin. Lavender, a scent she will forever associate with Paul Poiret. “I was born first—Mother didn’t even know she was carrying twins. By the time she’d pushed you out, you were blue and cold. Apparently dead.”

  Tears have welled up in Jeannette’s eyes, much to her own amazement. She is trying to blink them away.

  “Nonetheless, the midwife wrapped us up in one blanket together, and put us near the stove while she tended Mother. And when she looked at us again, both of us were pink and warm.” Sonya’s cheeks are flushed, Jeannette thinks, with the look of someone who is in love. “Only on her deathbed, Mother told me that I’d thrown my little arms around you and brought you to life again with the warmth of my body.”

  Jeannette has fainted before, from hunger and exhaustion. She recognizes the signs. She thinks, with horror, that she’s about to vomit, right there in the Café de la Paix.

  Sonya moves her chair close enough to keep Jeannette from falling—and folds her in her arms, sighing with relief at the feeling this gives her—of finally closing the circle. Of knowing that she will be whole again.

  Part II

  Paris

  1910

  Sonya wakes to the sound of rain—more rain. Would it never stop raining? Their street has become a river. Going out to buy bread incurs the risk of drowning. The Seine has overflowed its banks, making it impossible for all but the flattest boats to pass beneath the bridges.

  The boat owners are the lucky ones, able to row or pole their way from place to place around Paris. Sonya thinks about the pretty little boat Paul Poiret used once to ferry them to his cottage in Meudon. She could imagine him arriving at her doorstep, standing up in the bow, a wicker basket filled to the brim with delicious food.

  She stirs herself to light the stove so that her daughters will at least have a bit of warmth when she wakes them. But why wake them at all, when she has nothing today to feed them?

  Two days ago, a little dinghy tied up to the railing just beneath their balcony. Two of the baker’s boys were hawking damp loaves of bread that Sonya and her neighbors were all too happy to buy, lowering baskets from their windows. They bought all there was, along with a small amount of butter and cheese.

  There’s no sign of the boat today, only a large fawn-colored dog, paddling madly to stay afloat in the churning black waters, its nose in the air.

  Olga joins her at the window, her glasses perched crookedly on her nose, her flannel nightgown longer, thicker, and warmer than the nightgowns of most of the ten-year-old girls of Paris. Sonya tells herself that at least she keeps her children well clothed.

  Olga slips her hand inside her mother’s. They both watch, gasping without being aware they’re doing so, as the dog, still struggling, disappears around the corner. Sonya had never noticed that their street, which seemed quite flat, sloped downhill.

  “Please, Mother—let’s not tell Baila about the dog. It will upset her so!”

  Sonya always senses Asher in this child—his keen mind, his clear-eyed view of the world. The fierceness of his desire to keep all of them safe.

  She squeezes Olga’s hand—and, just then, a bit of blue sky appears, like a sign from God.

  The rain lightens. Will it stop?

  As they stand there, hand in hand, a piece of furniture floats into view—a tall bookshelf, half-sunk like a shipwrecked boat. With an audible roar, the waters surge—and, riveted, they see another bookshelf, just like the first one, rocking crazily back and forth as the current carries it past their building.

  A few small rectangular objects glide into view from up the street on the swiftly moving river-road. And then a dense parade of books floats by, some open, some still closed, bobbing among splinters of wood on the dark river that was, a week ago, the rue des Rosiers.

  Olga has begun to sob. Surely, Sonya thinks, her daughter can’t possibly remember the smell and sight of the ruined and smoldering books torn from the shelves of Jewish homes and scattered, their pages fluttering in air filled with feathers and smoke, along the streets of Kishinev. Olga was only a toddler then—and she was fast asleep, her face pressed into Sonya’s shoulder. Is it possible, she wonders, that Olga—precocious even as a baby—opened her eyes as they’d rushed past the ruins of everything they’d held dear? That she’d seen, although Sonya had tried so hard not to let her children see, that nightmare vision of Asher’s corpse, there among the other dead—laid out, arms akimbo, faces bloodied and contorted with their final looks of horror?

  Sonya wonders if it’s Asher’s spirit that stirs in Olga now. Olga could withstand the sight of the poor, struggling, drowning dog, even though the sight of it was horrible. But to see these books, beautiful leather-bound, cloth-bound treasures of knowledge and words, their pages turning to pulp—their truth, their beauty, about to be lost forever—is too much for this word-loving little girl. She rips the glasses from her face, places her childish palms against the steamed-up window, and lets herself sink down, the glass squeaking against her cheek, until she’s level with her mother’s knees. “I can’t bear it,” she whimpers.

  Naomi joins them at the window. “Oh dear,” she says, looking out at the books floating by—and then down at her melodramatic little sister.

  Disentangling herself from her children, Sonya takes her hat and cloak from the hook by the door. “I’m going out to find some food for us,” she says as she buttons her cloak. They watch her climb up onto a stool in the kitchen and take down from the top shelf the stoneware crock where she keeps the housekeeping money. “No one is to leave this house—and you are to let no one in. Keep an eye on Baila. Do you understand me?”

  Naomi pipes up dutifully, “Yes, Mother.” Olga, still overcome with grief, says nothing.

  Sonya opens the window, letting in a blast of rain and wind. “Do you understand me, Olga?” she shouts, just before the wind blows her skirt up over her head. She yanks it down, gathering the hem into a fistful of fabric before swinging one leg out over the sill. She makes a grab at her hat just in time to keep it from blowing off her head, then hurls it back through the open window. Her face and hair are already drenched, streaming with rain. She hangs onto the sash with both hands until her boots make contact with the makeshift wooden sidewalk, more than the length of her body below the sill. Sonya gets some splinters in her hand as she lowers the rest of herself down and shouts up at her daughters to shut the window behind her. Wiping the rain out of her eyes, she looks up and down what was once their street, but there’s not a boat in sight.

  Olga and Naomi, astonished looks on their faces, are watching their mother. Both they and she know that she can’t swim. She’ll surely drown if she falls. Sonya wonders if she’s just done the most reckless thing she’s ever done so far among the many reckless things she’s done in her life. And then, already out of breath, she begins to pick her way with care along the waterlogged wooden planks, finding handholds wherever she can along the sides of the buildings.

  

  Olga continues to sit on the cold floor by the window while Naomi goes into their bedroom to comfort Baila, who is crying both for food and her mother.

  It was only recently that Olga read and reread De Charmette’s epic poem, “Orleanide,” about Joan of Arc, who was herself of such a tender age when she rode into battle to rescue France. Olga has the sudden inspiration to follow her brave mother outside—to rescue whatever precious books she can from the flood below!

  It seems an excellent idea—and she is, in any case, so tired of being stuck inside.

  She writes a farewell note, using the florid penmanship she’s been working long and hard to give the appearance of a grown-up’s writing: I leave you for a noble cause, she writes. God willing, I shall return. Naomi will no doubt laugh at her—but she doesn’t care. Hiking up her nightgown and slipping on her boots, she grabs an empty flour-sack from the pantry.

  The window is easy enough to open. But she slips and falls when she tries to lower herself down from the sill, barely keeping herself from tumbling off the edge of the raised wooden walkway. Her ankle, injured, starts throbbing, and her heart is thumping in her chest. The walkway is so slippery, and there’s so little in the way of railings, that she crawls rather than trying to limp and risk losing her balance again.