Her cousins, all from her father’s side, seemed as close and happy together as a litter of puppies. They all resembled one another. None of them resembled Jeannette. Their hair was lank and straight, where hers was abundant and full. They had freckles, enviable bosoms, and sturdy limbs. They made fun of her narrow feet with their high arches and long first toe.

  She used to stare at photographs of her mother, looking for the ways in which she might grow up to look like her. But she didn’t really resemble her mother either, no matter how carefully she studied the photos and ransacked her memory.

  How could it be that Jeannette looked so uncannily like Anna Pavlova’s Russian seamstress? It was evident from the moment they’d stood face to face in the doorway, their proportions exactly the same, their skin fine-textured and fair, their identical eyes deep-set, their faces heart-shaped, both of them with narrow, long-fingered hands.

  Jeannette knew of doppelgängers in literature and even in the ballet literature: Odette and Odile in Swan Lake. She suddenly remembers that English painting Paul Poiret had made a great point of taking her to see, when she and he were still going about together. She’d been more impressed by Paul’s nervous excitement over showing it to her than she’d been by the painting itself, which showed two identical couples in medieval dress happening upon each other in the forest. There was a look of horror in the eyes of the two girls, each a mirror image of the other.

  Just as the backstage bell chimes again, an idea falls upon her with the weight and rudeness of a piece of scenery toppling over. That pretty little girl in the dressing-room, with her honey-colored curls and wide-set eyes—that little girl looked like the child she and Paul might have made, if he hadn’t been such a pig.

  Kishinev

  1881

  Following the matron’s advice, Nadia refrained from visiting the orphanage, even though she thought about her babies every day and, especially, every night. She stinted herself on food at first, so that Daniel would have enough. She sewed for such long hours that her hands hurt and her head ached. At night, alone in her bed, she was plagued by guilt.

  The matron’s note, when it arrived, felt to Nadia like God’s judgment upon her. Zaneta was gone, taken away by a prosperous-looking couple from France who came and went while the matron’s new assistant was in charge.

  Nadia pleaded with the driver to make his horses go faster, crazed with fear that something would happen to the other twin before she got there—cursing herself for having ever let her babies out of her sight.

  The deeper meaning of this disaster was crystal clear: God had chosen to give his gift to someone more deserving. Nadia had been too weak, too gullible, too trusting. She knew she would never forgive herself.

  The moment little Sonya—much grown, fussing and squirming—was brought down from upstairs and handed over to Nadia, the baby heaved a ragged sigh and fell asleep with her mother’s heartbeat in her ears.

  “Look at that,” the matron said very softly. “She’s been inconsolable since yesterday.” She pulled the mother toward a chair—fearing Nadia was about to topple over—patted the mother’s shoulder, and gently touched the top of the baby’s head. “I asked the police commissioner for his help, to see if the pair of them could be stopped at the border.” She sighed. “But when he heard your name—”

  “Of course,” said Nadia. She would expect nothing else from the Russian authorities. All her efforts to secure her husband’s release had come to nothing. Every day, her hopes of seeing him again grew dimmer and dimmer.

  She refused the money the matron tried to give her, looking her straight in the eye and saying that, before God, she would never stand accused of selling her child.

  

  When Nadia arrived home with Sonya, Daniel looked suspiciously at the baby. With her big head and abundant dark hair, she didn’t at all resemble the tiny little sisters who had so mysteriously been taken away from him, nearly a year ago. “Who is this?” he asked his mother.

  “This is Sonya, Daniel!” Holding back her tears, Nadia placed the baby in her brother’s arms.

  He held her stiffly. This infant’s blue eyes were flecked with gold. She had chubby arms and thighs, whereas his little sisters had been delicate and lean, more like miniature children than babies. He sniffed the top of her head. She even smelled different.

  Looking into her eyes, he whispered, “What did you do with my sisters?” The baby reached up to grab at his glasses. Daniel tickled her, and she laughed with a silvery, bell-like sound.

  Could his sisters have merged into one larger child? Maybe, he thought, that’s what happens with twins, especially those who are born looking exactly alike. Or perhaps this child was a changeling, like one of those he’d read about in his book of fairytales! His mother certainly seemed entranced by her, entranced and also, somehow, fearful, as if the baby might at any moment disappear.

  Daniel’s urge to elucidate the truth of any given situation was already in evidence, even at the age of five. When he looked at this child his mother called Sonya, he felt something he couldn’t puzzle out. Something that made him love her, even though he knew he should probably fear her. The changeling in the story had similarly charmed everyone who laid eyes on her.

  

  Every night, after her children were asleep and she’d worked as long as she could by candlelight, Nadia grieved her lost baby, casting her thoughts abroad in the world, wishing she could find and comfort her. Praying that Zaneta was safe. She couldn’t bear the idea that any of her children would ever learn the truth about what had happened to the youngest member of their family.

  After deflecting Daniel’s outlandish questions as long as she could, Nadia lied for the first time ever to her beloved son. He was remembering things incorrectly, she told him. There had briefly been two babies—identical twins. That much was right. But only one of them had survived.

  She finally saved enough to bring Faya home again—poor Faya, who had been worked so hard that Nadia was loathe to give her any further chores. Like Daniel, Faya was a studious child, although her particular talent was for numbers, which she loved adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Nadia decided Faya could help her with the bookkeeping, which used to be Misha’s province.

  Lev came home once a week, smelling of horses and leather. Cheerful and kind, generous by nature, he was well loved by everyone. Little Sonya especially adored Lev.

  When word came that men from the army were visiting each Jewish household in Kishinev, snapping up all the boys over twelve years of age, Nadia sewed a set of Cossack clothes for her seventeen-year-old blond, blue-eyed son. She brought them to him at the stable yards, with enough silver sewn into the hems to buy forged papers and a passage to New York.

  “Promise me you’ll write!” she said, fearing that she’d never feel his arms around her again.

  How hard it was to let go—and yet it was the way of the world, Nadia reminded herself. She was determined not to let her son be stolen away by the tsar’s army, where Jewish boys were used as cannon fodder and harassed, if they survived, into converting.

  “Leave right away,” she urged him.

  Lev’s arms trembled, ever so slightly, as he held her. “Say goodbye for me, Mother, won’t you?”

  She nodded, taking a last long look into his eyes that were the blue of cornflowers. Her own maternal grandfather had such eyes, though his had been rheumy and rimmed with red. It seemed inconceivable to her that her Lev would ever be old.

  “Tell Sonya I’ll send for her, when I’m able.”

  “We’ll see about that, my son. The important thing now is for you to be careful and wise—and get yourself safely to the New World.”

  

  Misha was finally released from prison, nearly a decade after his arrest. It didn’t take Nadia long to understand why: he arrived home weak and ill, with a cough and fever. “It’s the flu,” he told her in a voice she barely recognized, faint and short of breath. “So many of the others were getting it, prisoners and jailors alike. Many were dying.”

  People everywhere that year, in 1890, were coming down with the flu that had spread from Saint Petersburg, moving west with the railroad lines, infecting the king of Belgium, the emperor of Germany and, they said, the tsar himself. It was spreading to every corner of the world.

  Nadia wore herself out, trying to nurse her husband back to health and also keep the children safe. But the flu seemed to defy all her precautions. The day after Misha’s return, Nadia put Faya to bed with a fever and chills. Daniel, who normally didn’t allow anything to keep him away from school, stayed home for two days with a painful headache.

  Ten-year-old Sonya, untouched by the illness, helped her mother as best she could, especially after Nadia herself came down with a cough. Bundling up against the cold, Sonya ran back and forth to the pharmacy for doses of quinine, Salicylate of soda, and whatever advice the beleaguered pharmacist could offer them.

  Nadia proffered golden spoonfuls of her chicken soup while she sat by Misha’s bedside and Sonya hovered in the doorway. “I dreamed of your cooking, day and night,” he struggled to say, “but I can’t taste or smell anything now!”

  Sonya saw him steal a look at her, shyly, as one would look at a stranger.

  He’d never seen her before—and she’d never seen him. Nadia encouraged Sonya to stay close—to speak to her father. They had a lot of catching up to do.

  Misha was too ill to speak—and Sonya had no idea what to say. She kept repeating the word Papa to herself, thinking how the word evoked a feeling she’d never felt before. Once, when she sat looking at his face on the pillow, he met her gaze with his deep-brown eyes—and she was startled to see how kind he was, and that it even seemed as if he loved her. She smiled, gently squeezed his hand, and said the word Papa out loud.

  But his illness only grew worse, no matter how tenderly they cared for him. It sounded as if each breath he drew and expelled belonged to a man who was drowning.

  The doctor, shaking his head, diagnosed acute pneumonia. On the seventh day after being reunited with his wife and family, Misha Luria died.

  Nantes

  1887-1896

  Jeannette Dupres was seven years old when her adored maman contracted scarlet fever. Jeannette was sent away, for an unspecified period of time, to live with some cousins from her father’s side. Arriving in a carriage two weeks later, dressed in mourning, Monsieur Dupres brought a new black dress for Jeannette to wear to her mother’s funeral.

  Everything good and sweet in Jeannette’s life up till then was buried that year under the rich dark soil of the Pont du Cens cemetery in Nantes. Her father’s eldest sibling—a dour woman who had always seemed faintly repelled by Jeannette, despite her pretty looks and winning ways—came to keep house for them. Jeannette’s papa immersed himself more and more in his work at the Bureau de Change, often dining out and returning home long after Jeannette had cried herself to sleep.

  Her aunt, hoping to find a way to distract the child from her grief, enrolled her in the elementary ballet class at the École de Danse Classique.

  Jeannette took an immediate liking to the studio, the teachers, and the other girls there, all of them devoted to the study and practice of ballet, to the discipline of training their bodies to move in prescribed ways passed down over hundreds of years by masters of the art. She loved the special clothes required for class—white satin slippers and tights, tunics or frothy tutus—which made her feel like part of a flock of beautiful birds.

  Her teacher was pretty and kind. With practiced hands, she gathered Jeannette’s long hair into the requisite chignon and pinned it in place. Jeannette looked on in the mirror, her eyes wide. She loved the mirrors, which lined every wall.

  First position, second position, third position—legs turned out, hands and arms shaped just so. One hand on the barre, toe pointed, leg extended—one long line. Back arched, neck long. Fifth position—shoulders back, arms overhead in a perfect oval. Head held high. Posture—she’d never thought about posture before. It was all a revelation.

  Flushed and excited after her introductory class, Jeannette seemed, to both her father and aunt, like a changed girl—and she slept beautifully that night. The next day, she informed her papa that she wanted to take as many ballet classes as he would allow—every day, if possible.

  She didn’t tell him that the dance world—for she soon realized that’s what it was—conferred on her a greater sense of belonging than anything she felt amongst her cousins or, since her mother’s death, at home.

  That world was not without its bitter pills. Although Jeannette had the requisite long legs and short waist just right for ballet, her turnout was poor. Even worse than that, she was told that her long first toe would make it difficult, if not impossible, for her ever to dance en pointe. These disabilities only made her more determined to work her way up from the lowest place in the line, to demonstrate that—although she was now motherless, and her father was cold, and her aunt was scandalized by everything about her—Jeannette would prove herself worthy, after all, of love and admiration.

  Alone in her room, she read her school assignments lying flat on her back, her bottom shoved against the wall and her legs spread-eagled, using gravity to remake her body. She devised a set of exercises to increase the rotation of her hips and improve the turnout that seemed to come so naturally to many of the other girls, whose fifth position was perfect—who could drop into splits as if they were made of rubber instead of flesh and bone. The physical pain would sometimes make her cry—and also helped her know that she was making progress. She wiped away the tears impatiently.

  At night, or in idle moments at school, Jeannette fantasized about having an operation to cut off the tip of her big toe, giving her the perfect squared-off feet made for toe-shoes.

  When she was finally allowed to take classes en pointe, both of her big toes bled, leaving brown stains on the rags and cotton wool she stuffed inside her shoes. She woke up the next day with several of her toenails turned black and blue. She kept the blood a secret. The pain lent a prescient intensity to her dancing.

  By the age of fourteen, Jeannette was given leading roles in all the school’s recitals.

  Her aunt disapproved, judging the girl’s obsession with dance to be unnatural. Her papa attended the recitals, and applauded at the right times, always judiciously. Once he told Jeannette that he was proud of her hard work and dedication, adding that he hoped she would soon find a worthy goal.

  Her goal was to become a professional ballerina, despite her aunt’s protestations that no decent people would ever allow their son to marry such a person. The stage was the realm of the demi-monde.

  But only when Jeannette was dancing on stage did she feel fully alive, excited, and happy. She didn’t care if this meant she was a wicked person. She didn’t want what her father and aunt envisioned for her future.

  She dreamed of feeling an audience in her thrall—astonishing them with her skill and artistry as a dancer. Moving them. Weaving a web of magic around them.

  At home or with her extended family, Jeannette felt a helpless sense of failing again and again to measure up or fit in—or even to be seen. She knew that dance classes would soon come to an end for her, as the school only taught girls up to the age of sixteen. She was offered a place there as an assistant teacher. But what Jeannette wanted, she was quite sure, couldn’t be achieved in Nantes.

  In any case, her father told her, not unkindly, Jeannette was at the time in life when she would need to lay the ground for her future—to acquire the skills and charms that would allow her to take her place in respectable society, to have her own home and keep her own table. In a very few years, to start a family.

  Her father’s words terrified her.

  The day after her sixteenth birthday, Jeannette packed a suitcase, gathered the little bit of money she had—and, choosing a time when she could leave undetected, boarded a train bound for Paris.

  Paris

  1896

  Jeannette stood motionless at the back of the darkened cabaret, ignoring the tray of cigarettes and sweets she was supposed to be selling, still trying to figure out whatever

  was behind the magic of Loïe Fuller’s performance.

  The diminutive American was every bit as much a conjurer as a dancer, swirling meters and meters of a moonlit silken garment around and above her head, now hiding, now revealing her form. She seemed to grow to the size of a mythical bird—a phoenix—with outstretched fiery wings, all the while turning and turning, the fabric unfurling like a sail, then folding like a rose, lit by a luminescence in otherworldly colors. The lights that revealed her came not only from above and beside the stage but also somehow from the fabric itself. It shimmered, glowed, and transformed the dancer, creating the illusion of an ever-changing storm of fairy-dust raining down from the heavens.

  The gentlemen with their top hats and monocles sat as if hypnotized, their aperitifs held motionless mid-air.

  There was some element involved in the stagecraft, something physical and yet invisible, that mystified Jeannette. All the waiters and the other cigarette girls had also stopped whatever they were doing, to simply stand there and gape.

  When la Loïe rose up from the bow that was a perfect mime of a dying rose—when she unfurled the fluttering silken sails of her sleeves, turned back to ecru silk again—the applause was so great, and the men stamped their boots so hard, that all the glassware on the little wooden tables rang like bells.

  This was Jeannette’s seventh time seeing the performance, but it was no less thrilling than it had been the first time. Rumor had it that Madame Loïe concocted whatever it was that made the colors so magically glow with the help of a brilliant and determined young Polish woman, a chemist—some said an alchemist—who’d been spotted in the audience more than once, always in the company of her husband, Monsieur Pierre Curie.