What did he expect then? He knew they were identical twins, didn’t he?

  “Mademoiselle Dupres,” the Frenchman says, smoothing over the awkward moment with polished civility. She guesses that he is also a Jew. “Do please sit down.”

  Daniel is holding his face in his hands, staring at the twin stolen away from his family so long ago. “It’s as if she lived again!”

  Jeannette says nothing, for a moment. And then she tells them, in a quiet voice, “She lives still.”

  “But the telegram!” says Daniel, half choking with emotion. “Poiret told us she was breathing her last breaths.”

  “Why are we standing here?” shouts Blum. “Eugène!” he calls into the outer office. “Get a cab for us—on the double!”

  “It’s all right,” Jeannette says, hoping to slow things down. “Sonya’s resting now.” She begins to realize, with self-recrimination, how monstrous her request will seem, under the circumstances. There’s no way, within the bounds of decency, she can raise it.

  “Not a moment to waste!” says Blum. “I can’t understand why she didn’t reach out to me!”

  “Or to me!” says Daniel.

  Jeannette has also wondered.

  “Should we bring a doctor with us?” Blum is barely able to contain his excitement. “I know a very good man.”

  “The doctor is probably by her side by now. The best in Paris, I’ve been told.”

  “Thank God for that,” says Daniel. “Come, René! Come—” He looks and blinks at her. “Jeannette!”

  A gust of wind threatens to blow off their hats. Taking Jeannette’s arm, René Blum helps her up into the cab. She wishes Eugène had hailed a bigger one. The three of them are crowded close together, knee to knee.

  She stares out the window to avoid their eyes.

  Did she expect them to have horns? When she thinks about it, it was her aunt, her hated aunt, who always had the most virulent, frightening things to say about the Jews. Her father was much quieter about his antipathy. Jeannette had grown up believing that it wasn’t something polite people talked about. And yet it was a fact of life—they were to be feared, as a people. Feared and loathed.

  Sonya seemed an exception, as were the various writers and artists Jeannette had met and come to know through Paul.

  Daniel is sobbing in that particularly choking, ugly way that men have when they cry. Jeannette, who is dry-eyed, thinks once again about how emotional these Russians are. She never in her life saw any of her male relatives cry, not once. Even after her mother’s death, her father didn’t shed a tear—at least, not in front of her.

  “I still can’t understand,” says Daniel, “why she didn’t write to tell me that she found you.”

  Jeannette vows to ask Sonya, straight out, if she does indeed recover fully.

  Had oh-so-respectable Sonya felt too ashamed to tell the truth about Jeannette to their brother, who is evidently a highly cultured and cultivated man? He’s the very type, she knows quite well, to have a mistress who is a dancer.

  What hypocrites men are! She hopes the clerk keeps his promise not to reveal that he’s seen her before, on stage at the Palais Garnier.

  Everything Jeannette had planned seems so ridiculous to her now. Far from having any chance of becoming Baila’s guardian, she will have to find a way to navigate this maze of family relationships she’s stumbled into—and all because she had to go and save Sonya’s life!

  

  The nurse conveys the doctor’s pronouncement that Sonya is too weak to see more than one person at a time. Daniel gives himself the privilege, taking Baila’s place on the chair at his sister’s bedside.

  Sonya opens her eyes when he takes her hand—and then she smiles that smile that has always been, to Daniel, so breathtaking in its beauty. Somehow so surprising, every time he sees her.

  “I was afraid I’d never get to see you again!” he says. “Poiret’s telegram—” He keeps himself from saying what he’d been about to say. Letting go her hand to wipe his eyes, he confesses, “Klara has been getting everything ready for your girls.”

  “Everyone, it seems,” says Sonya weakly, “wants my girls.” Sighing, she takes a long look into her brother’s eyes. “Last year, Jeannette demanded that I give Baila to her.”

  Daniel is momentarily silent, taking this in—considering what it might mean. Waiting for Sonya to say more. When she meets his silence with silence, he clears his throat in a lawyerly way. “There’s so much I want to ask you!”

  “Ask me, then,” says Sonya, gazing into his eyes. She thinks about how she has never felt very close to Daniel, perhaps because she’s never felt altogether safe with him. He has always seemed, since as far back as she can remember, suspicious of her. As if he blamed her, unfairly, for something she’s never been able to understand.

  “How long ago did you find her?” he asks—and she feels herself again under the unforgiving light of Daniel’s scrutiny.

  “Just last year.”

  “And you never told me.”

  “There was nothing to tell. She didn’t want anything to do with me. And then, just today, she decided she did.”

  Daniel was looking uncomfortable—as if on the verge of confessing something embarrassing. “I never believed, until I saw Zaneta today—”

  “Jeannette,” Sonya corrects him.

  Ever so slightly, he pulls away from her. Bristles a little, at the temerity of this interruption from his baby sister. Sonya had forgotten how much Daniel cares about maintaining the fiction that he’s in charge. “Do you know about the notion of tikkun olam?” he asks her, changing course.

  “You and Lev were the only ones who ever studied Hebrew.”

  “It refers to the project of repairing the brokenness in the world.”

  “Is it your project, Daniel?”

  “It’s mine, yes—and I suspect it’s yours too.”

  “I must tell Olga about it. It’s just the sort of thing that excites her imagination.”

  She wishes it were Lev at her bedside, instead of Daniel. She always felt so happy and safe around her brother Lev, so many years gone now, and so far away. “Do please say whatever it is you were going to say, dear Daniel. I’m very tired.”

  Daniel sees that the time is not yet right to fix what has been broken. What he had broken, by the beliefs he’d harbored when his mother first brought Sonya home from the orphanage without Zaneta. And what he and his mother had broken, sixteen years later, destroying that stack of letters to Sonya from the pharmacist’s son.

  There was no sense in telling her the whole truth now, when she was so weak, and so much was still uncertain. “I only wanted to say what a relief it is, and what a mitzvah, that you pulled through.”

  “Our sister saved me,” she says.

  “As you once saved her,” says Daniel.

  Part III

  Paris

  1911

  Sonya listens hard in the darkness, deciding that Jeannette’s breathing is too quiet to allow for her to be asleep. Speaking softly, she asks, “Are you awake?”

  “I am now.”

  “I’m sorry. Never mind.”

  “Do you need something?” Jeannette has insisted on sleeping on a cot in Sonya’s room, even though she has a lovely new bed with springs in her own room. She feels a sense of ownership vis-à-vis Sonya’s seemingly miraculous recovery. Performing a miracle—or so it seems to her—has turned out to be one of the most satisfying events of her lifetime. It hasn’t kept her from frequently feeling annoyed by Sonya.

  “I was only wondering,” says Sonya. “whether perhaps you also have a very dark place inside you, like I do. A place of hopelessness that’s always there, even when you’re happy—always waiting for your return.”

  Jeannette is silent for such a long time that Sonya assumes she’s not going to answer her. It was a stupid question, anyway—just the sort of question that Jeannette has shown herself unwilling, for the most part, to entertain.

  Sonya is hovering on the edge of sleep again when Jeannette speaks up from the darkness. “In the middle of the night, sometimes. Especially when I’ve woken up and can’t manage to get myself to sleep again.”

  The recrimination isn’t lost on Sonya. But she’s used, by now, to the barbs so often contained in her sister’s conversation. She sighs. “I’m always afraid of losing what I love. I wish I could be less afraid—that I could simply feel contentment in what I have, rather than always feeling afraid of losing it.”

  “Only idiots are simply content. But, yes—I have also always been afraid of that darkness inside me. Of feeling unworthy of being loved.”

  This is one of the very things Sonya has longed for—to speak like this, with such intimacy, with her sister. It means so much to her. It makes the darkness seem less dark. “Do you think,” she ventures, “that it’s because we’re twins that we both feel this way?”

  Jeannette considers this. She’s been spending a surprising amount of time thinking about such matters, ever since that day she and Sonya confronted one another in the Café de la Paix. “Maybe it’s because your mother—our mother—” Jeannette pauses. “Maybe it’s because the choice was made to send us away to an orphanage, while your brother Daniel, the worthier child, was kept at home.”

  “But you knew nothing of that until I told you.”

  “I knew, after my mother died, that there was something wrong with me—something shameful. And that was finally confirmed for me—you’ll excuse me for saying this—when I learned of my origins.”

  “And do you still feel shame at being Jewish?”

  “I don’t know what it means to be Jewish! Is it like a new coat I’ve suddenly put on, a coat that I can’t ever take off now, no matter if it suits me or not?”

  “I’ve always felt quite glad when I’ve acquired a new coat…”

  Jeannette is in entire agreement with that one—but doesn’t concede the point to Sonya. The darkness is beginning to seem less impenetrable. Jeannette can just discern the outline of her sister where she lies, huddled under her duvet. And there’s that fleeting sensation again in Jeannette’s body, that ghost of a memory of the two of them, sharing the same small space. It’s gone in an instant. “I’m the same person I’ve always been,” says Jeannette in a bored tone of voice, “except I suddenly have a lot of new relatives.”

  “But that’s the point, Jeannette! You are the same person you’ve always been—and you’ve always been Jewish by birth, even though the fact was kept hidden from you.”

  “But, honestly, I don’t understand what it means. Does God love me any more, or any less, now that I’ve been revealed as one of those my family always reviled?”

  “Hold my hand,” says Sonya.

  “Why?”

  “Just do, please.”

  They stay like that, holding hands across the space between their beds, for a few moments of silence, broken finally by Sonya. “I don’t myself understand exactly what it means to be Jewish.” She understands, though, what it means to feel hated for being Jewish.

  “Your hand is trembling,” says Jeannette. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Sonya squeezes the hand that holds hers. She wishes there were a wordless way to share her memories, the good and the bad, with her sister. To convey all those feelings that are so vivid inside her—that sometimes overwhelm her. The terror that comes to her sometimes, in the middle of the night, remembering the pogrom. The memory of Asher’s bruised and contorted face, where he lay, in the makeshift morgue. Her memories of riding around on Lev’s shoulders when she was just a little girl. Of their father’s eyes. The shop in Kishinev. The sound of the little bell on the door that tinkled every time it was opened or closed. Her mother’s chicken soup. Jascha’s kiss.

  It’s doubly hard to try to find words for all of it in French. She sighs. “Our Jewishness is something like the connection between us, I think. It’s something the blood knows. Something deeper, older, and wiser than our own individual lives and all the selfish things we wish for.”

  “Do you think Jews are less selfish than others?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I think that Jewish people come in all the types and varieties that occur in every other population. There are those who are very good and those who are less so. But there’s something in the culture—I’m not sure how to describe it. An idealism, maybe. A sense of yearning. A longing for goodness. For peace. To live a good life.”

  “But surely people of every religion would say much the same.”

  “Well, no doubt. But I don’t think it’s all that much about religion. Because I feel Jewish even though I’m not religious.”

  “You’ve confused me completely now!”

  “It’s a confusing issue. But it distresses me, more than I can say, that you feel nothing but shame at our origins. I’ve been hoping that, on some level, you’d come to feel a sense of pride. It can’t have escaped your notice, given that you move about so much in society, that an outsize proportion of the world’s great artists, writers, and thinkers are Jewish!”

  Silently, Jeannette concedes the point. “Nonetheless,” she says, “I still have that dark and hopeless place inside me, very much like that place you describe.”

  Sonya squeezes Jeannette’s hand again, then releases it. She doesn’t think that either of them is likely to fall back asleep. Light has begun to seep in from beneath the flounced curtains that match a pinafore she made for Baila with the leftover fabric. “Does everyone, do you think, feel a sense of shame, deep inside themselves?”

  “Maybe not. But maybe so. We Catholics have made a great cult of Original Sin.”

  Sonya dislikes the fact that Jeannette still describes herself as a Catholic. It irks her that her twin refuses to embrace their shared patrimony. It feels like a rejection of her. “Do you think,” she ventures, “that you and I are broken in the same way, always questioning whether we’re worthy of love?”

  “I think we’re all running from whatever demons we carry around inside us,” says Jeannette, “straight into the arms of death.”

  

  Paul pays Jeannette and half a dozen other mannequins to go into public places wearing his latest fashion statement, the hobble skirt. After the trauma of their first such foray, the women band together to demand double the usual rate of pay: the skirts, banned by the clergy, are causing riots wherever they’re modeled. Newspapers run outraged editorials every day. In the space of a month, Paul has to hire extra seamstresses to keep up with the orders, which have also begun to come in from abroad.

  After the unprecedented freedoms—and scandal—afforded by Poiret’s famous war on the corset, the most fashionably dressed women of Paris can now walk only with small mincing steps, their knees pinioned. The restrictions of the hobble skirt necessitate revealing a shocking expanse of leg whenever someone wearing one has to step out of a carriage or up onto a sidewalk. Jeannette accuses Paul of hating women. His standard reply to her is to protest that, on the contrary, he worships the female body.

  

  As Jeannette waits on the platform at the Gare de Lyon, an announcement blares over the loudspeakers—something about a mechanical problem, or a problem on the tracks. Only halfway through, Jeannette realizes it’s the train for Monte Carlo—her train—that’s been delayed. She looks up at the station clock. If she’s quick about it, she calculates, there will be time enough for her to buy a jambon beurre for the journey.

  She’d meant to pack some food before she left. But the atmosphere at the apartment had been too fraught. Sonya kept begging her not to go. Jeannette kept trying to convince them all that Baila should come with her. All of them, except Olga, were in tears by the time Jeannette, swearing at all of them and blaming all of them for making her late, slammed out the door with her suitcase and hatbox, determined to be on time for the pre-rehearsal meeting at the Palais du Soleil in Monte Carlo.

  With the sandwich tucked into her handbag, Jeannette feels a little calmer. And then she hears another announcement, referring to the replacement train for Monte Carlo, just departing now from a platform two tracks over from where she’s been sitting. There must have been a second announcement while she was buying her jambon beurre. It’s like a nightmare. She’s been waiting all this time at the wrong platform.

  What an inauspicious start to her return engagement with the Ballets Russes!

  Diaghilev’s company is providing a bonanza of opportunity for the freelance ballerinas of Paris and beyond, eager to participate in any of his productions. Jeannette knows full well that she’s just one of a legion of trained dancers who possess professional ambition but have lacked the luck to win the roles that would allow them to be noticed, if only briefly, by those who matter.

  Stranded, having missed her train—disgusted with herself and with her life—Jeannette watches all the other people with their suitcases, their families, their lovers, and their sense of purpose, all of them hurrying past the bench where she’s sitting immobilized. Her eyes well up. She feels like a fool, once again, for continuing to hope for success as a ballerina—and for some kind of redemption from that success.

  There’s not another train leaving for Monte Carlo for another three hours.

  At the same little café where she bought the sandwich, Jeannette sits down at the bar and orders a glass of wine.

  When her train, the right train, pulls up to the platform, Jeannette is the first passenger to climb aboard.

  Placing her hatbox on the seat next to her, she hopes no one will ask to sit there.

  When she’s finally, safely settled into her seat, she allows herself to luxuriate in the sounds of travel. The guard’s shrill whistle at the moment when the train is about to leave the station. The plaintive one-step rise of the steam trumpet. The leonine huffing of the engine that starts in a slow 4/4 time, becoming deeper and faster. Like a lover’s urgent breathing. Becoming a steady flicker of sound. Like an entrechat quatre, too fast for the eye to see the individual beats of the dancer’s toe-shoes flickering in the air.