Mademoiselle Romola—who speaks Hungarian and French but no Russian—enlists Baila to translate for her when she wants to talk to Nijinsky. Romola speaks in French, gazing at the dancer with her large, anxious eyes, while Baila renders whatever she’s said, as best she can, into Russian.

  They don’t, as far as Baila can tell, say anything of much consequence. But as a consequence of the service she renders, Baila becomes a great favorite of Nijinsky. Unlike so many of the other men on board, who look at her as if she were a pudding they want to devour, Nijinsky seems to love her with the guileless love of the shipboard dogs.

  

  Dear Olga,

  Before I tell you anything else, I must tell you about the dogs. There are eight of them I’ve met and befriended so far. You won’t believe this, but there’s also an absolutely gorgeous cheetah, although his owner is in first class and doesn’t seem to want to have anything to do with the dancers.

  I’m greeted with joy now by two King Charles spaniels who are as alike as twins, a sweet and ridiculously shy Havanese, a shih tzu who tries to bite everyone else who comes within range, a Maltese who wears a diamond collar that any girl would feel lucky to have for her dowry, an adorably ugly French bulldog, an elegant Italian greyhound, and a thirteen-year-old Boston terrier who seems to think he was my doting grandfather in a past life.

  I know you’re probably fuming at the moment, thinking, “That stupid Baila! Why can’t she describe any of the things I care about?”

  And so I will. You see, I’ve heard your voice, my angry sister, halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. Actually, I have no idea if we’re halfway, or how far we’ve come. There’s been no way to tell where we are, from the moment we lost sight of land.

  Last night a sailor told me, before I ran away from him, that there are ways to calculate one’s position at sea by looking at the stars and consulting special instruments, if one knows how to read them. How I wish you could see the stars from the middle of the ocean, on a cloudless night! We’ve had only two of them so far—but I will never forget the sight as long as I live.

  I had no idea there were so many stars in the sky. Or that the sky, at night, looks like a great inverted bowl, studded with jewels. Or that, finding oneself beneath such a sky, it can seem that everything one knows, and everything one is, has shrunken to the size of a lentil. We are so small, Olga! Even the greatest among us is so small.

  I hadn’t a clue about how many cunning arrangements the stars, as they’re revealed out here, form against the perfect black velvet of the sky. Wherever you look, if you look long enough, you’ll see one of them leaping so quickly from its perch up there that, if you blink, you wonder if you only dreamed you saw it. And then you look at another place in the sky for a long enough time, and another star does the most graceful grand jeté you can possibly imagine.

  The constellations are all completely different, here in the Southern Hemisphere. The sailor told me the names of several of them before he put his hand right down my knickers. Instead of the kiss he asked for, I gave him a kick in the shins and ran as fast as I could—and you know I’m fast—all the way to our stateroom. I don’t even know some of the words he was shouting at me, but I can guess that they weren’t very nice.

  Now that I’ve spent hours under the night sky, out at sea, I know that we misuse the word “star” to speak of one performer who shines more brightly than all others. The stars, when the city sky is peeled away, are a living fabric of bright, shining, pulsating points of light, as chock-a-block and indistinguishable as dancers in the corps de ballet. Like the corps, they work together to form a picture—or the kind of picture you, Noni, and I make when we play “connect the dots.”

  But the sorts of performers that we have been used to calling “stars”—dancers such as Karsavina or Nijinsky—should be called something else instead, “a sun” or “a moon,” maybe. Such people are able to express what they are—and how special they are—with the simplest movements, without any words at all.

  When Nijinsky takes his class on deck in the mornings—sometimes by himself and sometimes with others—it’s impossible not to see in a glance that he embodies everything that is ballet. He is the sun that shines in the eyes of all the dancers and many of the passengers aboard this ship. And at night he is our moon.

  

  The child is the only one who knows the content of their conversation, which, in the end, Nijinsky is able to complete without Baila’s aid. “Would you like—?” he says to Romola, her white frock with its layers of lace and pearls glowing in the moonlight. Nijinsky has only to take her right hand and pinch the ring-finger between his middle finger and thumb as he steadies her with his other hand at her waist, all the while searching the depths of her blue eyes for an answer.

  Baila, at this point, has put her hand over her mouth, cognizant of the intimacy and importance of this grown-up moment she’s witnessing at the railing, while the phosphorescent sea sluices by them, far below. Romola blurts out “Oui!” in the same instant that Baila begins to say, in Russian, “Yes, she is accepting you.” But there is no need, as Nijinsky, his eyes shining, has clearly understood her on his own.

  Romola, from behind Nijinsky’s back, signals Baila to get lost.

  off the coast of Buenos Aires

  1913

  Nijinsky is sure he’s dying. Yes, it is his little wife who is suffering so terribly from the ship’s motion in her delicate condition, with his baby starting to grow inside her. He and she are both sure—the ship’s doctor is sure. She’s throwing up all the time now, whereas, on the previous part of the journey—the worst part, crossing the Atlantic—she’d been fine. Now her face is green and the smell of any meat or fish makes her flee.

  The ship’s doctor only laughed when Nijinsky told him that he was also ill.

  What can it be that’s growing inside him, making his stomach strain against the waistband of his silk tights—making him examine what comes out of his body into the toilet? Every day, he expects to see blood.

  There is no one he can trust to help him find the truth—and help him to get well. He lies awake at night, worrying that it’s from the things Diaghilev did to him, all those years, when it would have been an act of folly and ingratitude to refuse Sergei the satisfaction of his lust. Or was it love? Sergei always said how much he loved his Nijinsky. A god of the dance, he said, repeating what they wrote in the papers about him.

  He finds the child standing by the railing on a night he can’t sleep. Both of them stand there, in companionable silence, looking down at the phosphorescence of the sea as the Avon slices through the water like a silver knife cutting into a blanc-mange made of moonlight.

  What would his child be like? Surely he will have a son! Or will Romola give birth to a little girl, like this one?

  “Baila,” he says to her, kneeling down to speak to her eye to eye. “I want to consult a doctor—a real doctor, a fine doctor—when we stop again in Buenos Aires. But I must find one who speaks Russian or Polish. Will you help me?”

  Baila puts her hand on his shoulder. “Of course, Gospodin Nijinsky!” She shivers suddenly, although it isn’t cold. “I won’t be allowed to go ashore without my mother or my aunt.”

  “Does either of them speak Spanish?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Never mind. Let it be your mother then. I don’t want any of the dancers to find out.” He sighs, standing again, turning away from the sea toward the ship, with its rabbit warren of staterooms and dining rooms, ballrooms, passageways and bars, all of them teeming with people who can’t be trusted. Any one of them who might be a spy for Sergei.

  

  The first pharmacy they come to not only has a pharmacist who can speak several languages but is also able to recommend a doctor—a famous doctor—who speaks Russian. Vaslav Nijinsky is already a celebrity in Buenos Aires. The pharmacist is able to get him an appointment that very morning.

  Baila and Sonya wait in the doctor’s reception room while Nijinsky is brought inside by the nurse. After ten minutes or so, looking much relieved, he walks out with the doctor beside him, a kindly hand on the dancer’s back.

  “I am not dying!” he says to Baila and Sonya. “There is even a name for the symptoms afflicting me—symptoms that afflict, it seems, many new fathers-to-be.”

  “Couvade syndrome,” the doctor says. He puts his hand on Baila’s head. Then he looks at Nijinsky with a smile. “Not your daughter, surely.” And then he notices Sonya, who is staring at the nameplate displayed on another door.

  All the color has drained from her face.

  “Are you quite well, madame?”

  Sonya is holding her hand to her heart and breathing rapidly. “A moment, please.”

  Etched into the brass plate is the name Jascha Gittelman, MD.

  When she’s able to speak again, Sonya asks, “Is your colleague here today—behind that door?”

  “Dr. Gittelman is on leave. Do you know him? Perhaps you know that his wife very recently passed away.”

  Sonya shakes her head. The others are all staring at her.

  “Do you know him, Mama?” asks Baila.

  Sonya had never told her children about her first love—and why would she have ever done so?

  Baila has come up close to her, nestling in the crook of Sonya’s shoulder.

  “Jascha and I grew up together, in Kishinev—years before I met your father, darling.”

  The other doctor has cocked his head at her. “You aren’t the famous Sonya, are you?”

  “I’m certainly not famous.”

  Nijinsky speaks up then, still buoyant with good spirits. “Come, my friends,” he says. “If we don’t get back to the boat soon, it may leave without us.”

  “It won’t leave without you, Gospodin Nijinsky!” says Baila.

  The doctor gets a glass of water for Sonya and says to her softly, “Now is not precisely the right time, of course. But later—soon—I’ll tell him I saw you. I know he won’t forgive me if I fail to find out where you live and how you can be reached.”

  She’s shivering. ‘The famous Sonya’! Famous in what way? Famously unsuitable? Famously not good enough for Jascha? But if he’d spoken of her in such terms, surely his colleague would never have let on that he’d heard of her.

  The doctor gives her a card printed with the name and address of their practice.

  “Are you ready?” says Nijinsky, not unkindly.

  Baila takes her mother’s hand. “Let’s go back now, Mama. Aunt Jeannette will think we’ve run away.”

  

  Jeannette and Sonya, practiced sailors now, stand at the railing, looking west at the last of South America’s silhouette against the twilit sky. Neither speaks until the land has disappeared.

  “I’m wondering,” says Jeannette, “whether I shouldn’t have just stayed there—and started over again.”

  “But René is waiting for you—”

  “René! I don’t think René really wants to marry me.” The wind drops—and the sigh of the ship’s wake is suddenly louder. “I think René wanted to marry you.”

  Sonya has felt guilty for the pleasure she herself has had in this thought. “René was once in love with me. But in you he found something he could never have found in me—a Jewish wife he could bring home to his mother—”

  Jeannette snorts. “A Jewish wife! You must be joking, Sonya!”

  “—and a dancing girl he could bring home to his bed.”

  “Why are you so intent on marrying me off when you yourself are so determined to stay single?”

  “I am a widow with children.”

  “Your children are nearly grown.” Jeannette narrows her eyes at her sister. “What is it that you want, Sonya?”

  “The biggest thing I longed for was finding you.”

  “And was finding me everything you hoped for?”

  Sonya notices that she and Jeannette are looking less and less alike. “Yes—and no.” She turns her face away, toward Argentina’s shore—at least she thinks the shore is there, somewhere, through the darkness. “There’s still that place inside me that feels so—bereft. That feels so alone.”

  It surprises Jeannette, how hurt this makes her feel. “Do you ever wish you had gone to Argentina, when your boyfriend invited you?”

  “I would never have found you then.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  Sonya sighs, feeling a sense of oneness with the sea sliced open momentarily by the movement of the ship—and closing up again, all its darkness and all its secrets locked away. “Yes,” she says. “I have a deep sense of regret, and it pains me—because I would never have had Naomi, Olga, and Baila then.”

  “You would have had other children—Jascha’s children.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  Jeannette is wondering if she shouldn’t just keep her mouth shut. She knows that if she were Sonya, she would resent the hell out of it later, if she were kept in the dark by her twin about something so important to her. “René told me something, supposedly in confidence—but I really think you should know about it.”

  “What?”

  “You know that letter you once showed me, the one in Russian—the one you’ve kept, all these years?”

  “Jascha’s letter.”

  “There were others. Your brother Daniel—he was only your brother then—urged your mother to destroy them before they ever reached you.”

  Sonya closes her eyes against the sudden dizziness she feels. She’s at her mother’s bedside again, her mother’s labored words in her ears. Had she been about to confess that too?

  Gently, Jeannette puts her hand over Sonya’s on the railing. “He was worried—both of them were worried—about you leaving Russia. About never seeing you again. And I suppose they were simply worried about you. They thought of Argentina as some kind of wilderness. And your mother—”

  “Our mother.”

  “—our mother. Really, your mother, because she never knew me. Your mother loved you more than any of her other children.”

  “That’s so patently untrue! She loved Daniel best. She put us in an orphanage!”

  “In the coinage of children,” says Jeannette, “boys are made of a more precious metal than girls. If girls are silver, then boys are gold.”

  “Olga would have something to say about that.”

  Sonya’s heart is doing flip-flops inside her chest. What had Jascha written in those letters she had never been allowed to see? Had he loved her, as she loved him? Had there been a proposal of marriage?

  Had Jascha married someone else, just as Sonya had married someone else, because marriage was necessary and his first love—his great love—had disappeared?

  Jeannette asks quietly, “Would you have made a different decision, if you had known?”

  “I don’t know.” Inside, Sonya is saying the word for yes in Russian, over and over again.

  And yet she can’t bear to think about Naomi, Olga, or Baila never having come into the world. Does the essence of who we are exist somewhere outside the world—and find a way in, by whatever means it can, if it must? Aren’t all of us, thinks Sonya, so much more than something made of, and by, our parents?

  Jeannette can tell that Sonya is lying and doesn’t care. She’s learned that there’s precious little they can hide from one another. “If Paul had never met you,” she says, “I wonder whether he wouldn’t have grown tired of me sooner.”

  “Paul never grew tired of you. I’m quite sure of that. And whatever feelings he had for me were based on my resemblance to you.”

  “It’s a kind of curse being a twin, isn’t it?”

  “Or a kind of blessing.”

  “Do you ever wonder,” says Jeannette, “what our lives would have been like if we’d grown up together—in Russia or in France?”

  “I used to think about it a lot. But now, I think we’d forever have been trying to prove how different we were, one from the other, and competing for everyone’s love. But I would have loved having you as an ally, as a friend.”

  “And you have that now.”

  “I have that. And still—”

  “And still there is that empty place inside us—inside us all.”

  “Maybe all of us long for that place,” says Sonya, tipping her head back to look at the sky, “that timeless place, before life begins and after it ends, where all of us are starlight.”

  “Instead of trapped inside these bodies,” says Jeannette.

  Baila comes running up to them. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

  “We were looking at the stars,” says Sonya.

  “Did you know,” asks Baila, inserting herself between her mother and her aunt, “that the constellations are different here than they are in the northern hemisphere?”

  “The only constellation I ever learned to recognize,” says Jeannette, “was Gemini—the twins. Paul Poiret pointed it out to me.”

  Sonya says, with faux naivete, “I wonder why.”

  “It isn’t here then.” Baila’s voice is filled with a sort of triumph she rarely gets to feel. “The twins don’t exist anywhere in this sky!” She looks up at her mother and aunt, and adds, almost as if speaking to herself, “I wish Noni and Olga could be here now.”

  “It won’t be long now,” says Sonya, “until we’re all together again.” She looks up just in time to see a falling star—but too late to point it out to the others. “I wonder what 1914 will bring. The world has a way of changing so quickly.”

  Part VI

  Paris

  1914

  Olga surges along with the crowd at the Place de la Concorde, eye-level with the soldiers’ epaulettes, clutching her notepad and pencil. Where to start? How can she find the lede for her story, surrounded by so many chaotic and yet heartbreaking details?