For the first time all evening, Olga laughs. The music starts again, and she puts her glasses back on. She feels that she could happily walk by this man’s side forever, leash or no leash.

  Gaston smiles down at her—and then, with a wink, assumes a serious, exotic sort of Persian expression. “Marmosets! Beautiful marmosets!” he sings to the crowd.

  “Marmosets! Adorable marmosets!” Olga warbles.

  Before they’ve moved very far away from the base of the stairs, several costumed guests, all of them women—many with a lot of skin exposed—come closer to inspect the marmosets and the man. They make the sort of noises Baila makes whenever she’s in the presence of a large-eyed, round-faced animal that excites her maternal instincts.

  A few of the women don’t even bother pretending to look at the monkeys but focus all their attention on Gaston. “How much?” a silk-robed beauty asks him, batting kohl-rimmed eyes above her veil.

  Olga is gratified to see Gaston act with cool indifference as he quickly makes one sale and then two more, never showing any of the women the warmth he showed to her.

  “It’s awfully close in here,” he says in an aside to Olga. “What do you say to making our way outside?” It’s thrilling to hear him speak to her just as if she were an adult.

  They pick their way through the crowd of guests and waiters, out into the gardens, where sculpted bushes and flowering potted plants are all decorated with tiny lights, and the pathways have been covered in plush Oriental rugs.

  “Marmosets! Marmosets!” Gaston calls out, echoed by Olga, “They make marvelous pets!”

  They stroll past pink ibis, flamingoes, and a screaming white peacock wandering over the lawn. Parrots and macaws fly in tiny bursts of color past their heads, making the marmosets whimper in fear. Bigger monkeys stare out from the trees, attached to their perches by thin silver chains. The balmy air is filled with a tantalizing smell of curries, although whatever cooking is going on is hidden. Carved wooden tables throughout the garden are loaded with every kind of exotic delicacy, which Olga would have felt much better about sampling if the monkeys weren’t constantly clambering down onto her head, into her arms, and then jumping back onto Gaston again.

  Several different orchestras are playing softly, also hidden behind the shrubberies, the music growing louder and then fading away again as Olga and Gaston follow the maze of pathways. Here and there they come upon throngs of braziers with blue smoking incense, tended by bare-breasted black-skinned girls. “Really, it’s too much,” Gaston says, reaching down to turn Olga’s wide-eyed gaze away as he and she pass by.

  A waiter comes up to them, proffering a tray of delicacies. “Messieurs?” he says, squinting at Olga. “Uh, mademoiselle?”

  “Oh no, no, no, no, no! Get away from us, please!” says Gaston.

  But it’s too late. A waterfall of marmosets comes tumbling down onto the tray, upsetting it—and sending the waiter to the ground in the middle of a great pile of spilled food and crockery. Scooping up as many of the marmosets as they can, vying with each other in the courtliness of their apologies to the waiter as they help him to his feet, Olga and Gaston escape further away into the garden. They pass by guests reclining in the shadows on carpets and cushions, some of them in poses that Olga has only seen depicted in books she’s browsed through in the bookstalls along the Seine. Gaston takes her by the hand, leading her into the Persian bazaar that has been constructed, seemingly by miraculous means, in the courtyard of Poiret’s mansion.

  Olga knows they are at the very center of Paris—and yet it is as if they were in another world. There are butchers and what look like the skinned bodies of goats and lambs hanging by their feet. Intricate alleyways snake in between soothsayers hawking amulets next to potters at their wheels, cobblers pounding on boot lasts, and tailors who come out from behind their shop stalls to accost people with their measuring tapes and shears. Wonderful smells of dates, figs, and cardamom waft up from the clay ovens of the sweetmeat vendors.

  In the middle of it all, there’s a raised stage and a slave merchant who calls out, as Gaston and Olga walk by, “Look at these two fine fellows! How much for these?”

  “We’re not for sale!” Olga hollers at him, brandishing her scimitar.

  There’s a burst then of gold, silver, and blue fireworks that light up Gaston’s delighted eyes—and illuminate a line of tulle-clad ballerinas on the roof of the mansion.

  “Imagine!” he whispers. “Actual dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet—here, among us!”

  “It’s really not all that wonderful, take it from me,” says Olga.

  There’s another burst of fireworks. The ballerinas look like ghosts now through the haze of pale gray smoke.

  “Marmosets! Lovely, lovely marmosets for sale!” Gaston sings out with a note of yearning in his voice now.

  A few more of the guests, all of them female, buy a marmoset, leaving a single layer of them ranged across Gaston’s shoulders, peeking out from behind his head.

  Baila comes running up to them. “The big monkeys have all broken their chains—there’s one!” She streaks after it, followed by several other children, all of them shrieking with delight.

  Gaston consults his pocket watch. “We should go inside now.”

  They make their way back into Ali Baba’s cave just on time to hear a gong sound and see a bare-chested, beautifully muscled Black man unlock the door of a great golden cage that takes up an entire corner of the room that is lit now by stage lights.

  “That’s Madame Poiret,” Gaston tells Olga, indicating the slender woman lounging on silken pillows in the center of the cage. She leaps up when the door is unlocked, showing off her flowing harem pants and silver tunic, the bejeweled bangles on her arms and ankles, the gems on her fingers, toes, and ears—and a white and silver turban fixed with an outsized ruby and a white feather so fluffy and large that it looks as if she’s going to take wing. After everyone has had a chance to admire her ensemble, she runs out of the cage, followed by a bevy of other pretty women meant to be the sultan’s harem. The sultan—who is, of course, Monsieur Poiret in all his jeweled and turbaned glory—runs after them with surprising fleetness, brandishing a leather whip. The women run before him, screaming and laughing, all through the rooms of the house and into the garden before the sated guests, while he cracks his whip with a fearsome sound.

  “It’s all in fun,” Gaston tells Olga when she clings to his leg. The memory of Jeannette’s slap is still vivid for her.

  Naomi, released from the costume room—gloriously costumed herself—stands before them, hands on her hips. “Well,” she says. “Aren’t we cozy!”

  “Go with your friend, little one. Get some food. You’ve earned your wages tonight. And so have I!”

  “Goodbye, Monsieur Gaston. Perhaps I’ll see you again!” calls Olga as he and the remaining marmosets disappear into the crowd.

  “Had fun, did you?” says Naomi. “And to think I was shut up in that smelly costume room all evening!”

  Baila runs up to them, shouting, “The monkeys are all loose on the Champs-Élysées!” Her eyes are wide. “Didn’t you save even one marmoset for me?”

  Olga moves her scimitar out of the way and slings an arm over Baila’s shoulder. “You know you wouldn’t be allowed to keep it.” All three of them know that Sonya might have been convinced, but their aunt wouldn’t consent to having a pet monkey in their house. “You’d only have your heart broken again.”

  “They’re so tiny—we could have kept it hidden from her!”

  Olga has left a smudge of brown greasepaint on her sister’s cheek. “Like that last kitten you brought home?”

  Baila’s eyes fill with tears, remembering the fate of the most recent small animal she’d tried to rescue. “I don’t understand how certain people can be so heartless!”

  “Let’s get some food,” says Naomi, linking arms with her sisters. “I don’t know about you, but I’m famished!”

  They walk along the banquet tables, heaping their plates with food—and find a sheltered place in the garden where they can watch and yet remain hidden.

  “Have you seen Monsieur Cocteau?” asks Naomi, sucking on a chicken bone. “He’s dressed, most fantastically, as a dancing girl. It’s such a shame that Mama opted not to attend! What is that, Olga, in your hair? It looks like a little prune.”

  Olga pulls her headscarf off, then rakes her fingers through her curls, coming away with something small and sticky. She wrinkles her nose as she examines it—then throws it into the shrubbery. “Monkey shit,” she says, wiping her hand on the grass that is moist now with the dew.

  It’s so irksome to be trapped in the body of an eleven-year-old. Olga comforts herself with the thought that in five years, if not sooner, she’ll be able to break free and find her own path in the world. How glorious it will be to confront the world with all the agency and power adults enjoy—to embrace everything that seems right to her, and to reject everything she recognizes as wrong! She can’t wait to leave the powerlessness of childhood behind her.

  Paris

  1911

  Sonya’s health has suffered since her illness. Her heart flutters inside her chest, followed by an inexplicable sense of dread, loss, and danger. She’s been having nightmares, end-of-the-world nightmares, from which she wakens drenched in sweat. She’s told no one.

  She woke fearful, that morning of the premiere, that Baila might make a fool of herself on the stage—although she only told her daughters, and Jeannette, that she’d woken with a migraine, and couldn’t possibly attend, despite the really good tickets Jeannette had managed to snag. It irks Sonya, in a way, that they had all been so understanding. She wishes someone had made her feel better, helped her get ready, and forced her to go.

  How festive and happy they’d all looked, going out the door.

  The handsome Regency clock on the shelf, a house-warming present from René Blum, seems to be ticking very loudly, now that she’s alone. He’d sent a bouquet that afternoon—although whether it was meant for her or Jeannette wasn’t entirely clear.

  As much as Sonya longs to trust her twin in a way she’s never trusted anyone else before, she’s never stopped fearing that, deep down, Jeannette wants Baila to be her child—and will stop at nothing to make that dream come true.

  

  What Olga keeps thinking about, while she waits for the curtain to rise, is what might have happened during those nine minutes and twenty-one seconds that were lost when France abandoned the Paris Meridian in favor of Greenwich Mean Time.

  Their family friend, Maître Blum, has been teaching Olga about Judaism, journalism, and many other subjects. He has told her that the theft of time is a crime like any other. Whenever she interrupts to ask a question or argue with something he’s said—or when Naomi expresses boredom or impatience with their lessons—he tells them that one minute wasted is a minute of learning lost—a precious minute of learning that can never be regained.

  What was lost then, Olga wonders, during those nine minutes and twenty-one seconds that were robbed from all of them in 1910? The year of Tolstoy’s death. The year of the Great Flood of Paris, when Olga and her mother both so nearly died. The year that brought Jeannette into their lives, folding her into their family and, so often now, making Olga’s life a misery. How differently might everything have turned out, if she could somehow regain that lost time?

  If she could only go back to that day when the waters crested, with those vanished minutes in her possession—if she’d known then what she knows now—perhaps she could have changed the outcome.

  Her thoughts are interrupted by the lavishly mustachioed, frail-looking man sitting next to her, René Blum’s writer friend, whom he’d purposefully placed by her side. “Pardon me, Mademoiselle Olga,” he says to her—and it’s clear to her now that he’s been watching her face, waiting for her to notice him.

  “Monsieur Proust?” she says, embarrassed at being observed during such a private moment in such a public place.

  He doesn’t smile. “I was simply wondering what you were thinking of just now.”

  Olga blinks at him then says, “I was thinking, monsieur, about lost time.”

  “Indeed.” He looks at her face again—then turns away when the dissonant sounds of Maestro Monteux’s orchestra begin—the horns and flutes and strings all tuning, intensely private and yet commanding sounds that make the audience go quiet.

  The elaborately coiffed lady sitting in front of them turns around with a chastening finger held up to her lips.

  The house lights dim, leaving them all in darkness.

  There’s a solo drum roll then, the same sort they’ve heard at public celebrations of military might or at public demonstrations of an officer’s shame.

  Naomi reaches over and takes Olga’s hand, squeezing hard. They’re both terrified for Baila—and also proud of her, and a little bit jealous. Olga feels grateful that Naomi, at least, can understand and share these complicated feelings.

  The black velvet curtain of the Théâtre du Châtelet, gleaming with jewels and mystery, rises to reveal a scene that’s exotic and foreign, and yet stirs Olga with the emotions of memory.

  The scene depicts, as described in the program for Petrushka, a Shrovetide Fair in Saint Petersburg in the 1830s. The set is a feast of bright colors and details that shout with the exuberance of a child’s painting and a child’s fears. Hucksters’ booths and an ominous-looking Ferris wheel. Turrets and flags flying in the distance. Teeming balconies—and, stage left, a puppet theater hidden behind curtains of shimmering pale-blue taffeta.

  The stage is bursting with a distinctly Russian and raucous early nineteenth-century crowd, farmers and soldiers and hawkers of treats and balloons, gypsies in their parti-colored, multi-layered silken skirts and scarves, and peasant women in their babushkas. Beautiful pink-cheeked Russian maidens, each with a thick honey-colored braid down her back, which levitates from beneath her kerchief as she’s whirled around or lifted in the air by flirtatious suitors and soldiers. A frightening-looking man, his face and arms terribly scarred, lumbers on stage in the arms of a real—and huge—black bear as the crowd backs away with cries of fear but then soon forgets about the bear in the swirl of color, music, and joy.

  The sisters scan the crowd in vain for Baila. But then she’s suddenly there, one of a sequence of colorfully costumed children careening down a huge slide and then disappearing into the swarm of revelers.

  Both Olga and Naomi know that if they were to find themselves on that stage, facing the audience, they would be rigid with self-consciousness and fear. But Baila, every time they catch a glimpse of her, looks at ease. She seems to be, indeed, in another world. A lost world that Olga never knew but nonetheless feels as if she remembers, somewhere deep inside her.

  Booted, long-shirted Cossacks dance the kazatsky, crouching and throwing their heels out, jockeying their balance from one foot to the other—then leaping up with arms outstretched. Defying gravity, each man competes to outdo the others. Their wild dance is interrupted by a blast from the trumpet announcing that the real entertainment is about to begin. But then an organ grinder strolls onstage from the wings, alongside a beautiful dancing girl who plays a triangle while she does the sorts of things both Naomi and Olga have seen their aunt do when she’s practicing ballet. It takes them both a moment to realize that this is their aunt.

  Olga steals a look up and across Naomi in time to see Maître Blum’s adoring gaze on Jeannette—and, for a moment, Olga can see her aunt through his eyes. She’s utterly transformed from the person they’ve watched and heard every day since she moved in with them, sweating and swearing in front of the stove or screaming at them, whenever their mother isn’t home (and sometimes when she is), to clean up their room.

  A second dancing girl whirls onto the stage. This one is even more limber and graceful than Jeannette, twirling and leaping to the delicate, bell-like tones of what sounds like a music-box or a toy piano.

  All is chaos and revelry, with both Baila and Jeannette appearing here and disappearing again in the crowd till a spotlight shines on the puppet theater, and the shiny pale-blue silken curtains are parted by a tall magician clad in the same icy shade of blue, with silver-shadowed eyes and snowy white hair.

  Three life-size puppets are revealed, hanging by their armpits as if crucified, several feet off the ground. There’s a grinning black-skinned Moor in military garb, with large white sleeves sticking out of his braided tunic, loose white trousers decorated with embroidered stripes, and a wooden scimitar hanging by his side. The toes of his white shoes point sideways in opposite directions. In the compartment next to him hangs a gaudily pretty ballerina with painted lips and a vacant look in her eyes. She is hung so that she balances on the points of her turned-out toes. And finally there’s a funny but sad-looking clown with one hand cocked by the side of his head and his booted feet looking as if they’ve become tangled in his strings.

  Naomi whispers in Olga’s ear, “That’s Tamara Karsavina. I’ll bet you didn’t recognize her!”

  “Of course I did!” she whispers back, even though she didn’t, at first, recognize the ballerina. Naomi is infinitely better than Olga at noticing and remembering people’s faces. But, anyway, she thinks with the usual flush of frustration and shame, the puppet dancers are so heavily caked in makeup that it’s almost impossible to recognize them as even being real. She has inferred from the program that the clownish puppet with the sad face—the title role—is being danced by Vaslav Nijinsky.

  But Olga would never have been able to tell if she hadn’t known beforehand. He has seemed like a different person each time she’s seen him onstage and, once briefly, backstage. And now, here he is, transformed again.