Alone at the table with Faya, Sonya dabbed at her lips with a napkin, glanced into the mirror, and announced that she would go to the pharmacy to pick up the medicine for their mother’s cough.
Faya gave her a look that said she knew quite well why her little sister was so willing to go out into the frosty night. Half the Jewish girls in Kishinev, it seemed, had a crush on Jascha, the pharmacist’s son. Faya wondered whether Sonya, with her pretty looks, had managed to win Jascha’s favor. Good for her then, she thought—and good luck in finding approval from Jascha’s family as a suitable match.
“I’ll clean up,” was all she said.
Sonya put on her new Astrakhan hat and coat and rushed out, through the shop, into the night, the little bell on the door tinkling behind her. She was too excited to mind the frigid air—and, anyway, it was a very short walk to the pharmacy, especially when she walked so quickly, practically running. Still, the cold made it hurt to breathe and brought tears to her eyes. It was a relief when she stepped into the warm, camphor-scented air of the pharmacy. She’d been certain she’d find Jascha there, at this late hour. And yet it was the pharmacist himself who stood at the counter with its décor of glass bottles in a rainbow of colors, patent medicines, and beautifully labeled jars proclaiming the merits of the nostrums and creams they contained.
The pharmacist looked down at her over his glasses. “Is your mother’s cough still dry?”
Sonya nodded her head. Sometimes she thought the pharmacist liked her. And at other times she thought he seemed wary of her. Did he notice the times when his son had touched her wrist or her palm, ever so briefly, across the counter, when he took the coins she handed him?
Jascha’s father turned from Sonya to call over his shoulder. “The medicine for Nadia Luria.”
“I have it ready, Papa.” Jascha rose up from where he’d been working at a lab bench in the back.
How Sonya loved his serious and handsome face! The dark hair that fell against his forehead. The golden gleam of his spectacles. The heat and humor of the warm brown eyes behind them. The graceful curve of his lips. She wondered what it would feel like to be kissed by him.
Jascha handed the little package, neatly wrapped in brown paper and string, to his father. Over his father’s shoulder, Jascha looked at Sonya with a barely suppressed smile, filled with mischief and something else. Something that made her feel odd and a little wobbly, as if it were she, and not her mother, who was ill.
And then another customer came in, demanding the pharmacist’s attention. “My son will ring you up,” he said to Sonya with a look that seemed to her a bit severe.
Everyone had the greatest expectations for Jascha, who was going to graduate, she heard, at the top of his class, justifying the expense and struggle his father had in getting him admitted to the secondary school. Jascha aspired to become a doctor, even though the difficulties associated with obtaining permission to study medicine in Saint Petersburg would be far greater still, given the strict quotas for Jews.
Sonya took her gloves off, ostensibly to accept the coins—but really because she hoped Jascha would touch her naked skin. She had a sudden image of the two of them, standing beneath a wedding canopy—and, mortified, felt herself blush.
Smiling now, Jascha took a little dried flower from his pocket and slipped the stem under the string of her package. A magenta flower. Sonya, who prided herself on her originality, had told Jascha once that magenta was her favorite color. Bending close to her bowed head, he whispered, “I’ll catch up with you at the corner. I won’t be a moment!”
***
The moment stretched into many minutes, until Sonya was fairly sure she was going to freeze, despite her warm coat and hat and the scarf she’d wrapped over her face. “Just a minute more—and then I’ll go,” she told herself. And then, “That’s it! How could he have made me wait like this, in the snow!”
And then Jascha appeared at the margins of the pale green, snow-filled light of the streetlamp under which she stood, stomping her boots, breathing out white puffs of steam.
Without a word, he unfastened two buttons of his overcoat, took both her gloved hands in his and placed them inside, snug against his chest.
“Forgive me, Sonya! My father gave me one thing and another to do before I could get away.” He lowered the scarf from her face, then stroked her cheek with his fingertips. “Like silk,” he murmured. Through his shirt and waistcoat—and through her thick gloves—she could feel his heart thumping. “I have news,” he whispered. “But you can’t tell anyone.” He took off his glasses, tucking them into his pocket. “My family is emigrating—to Argentina!”
It took her a moment to take this in—to try to understand what it might mean for her. Argentina! “But why there, Jascha, of all places?”
“There is a famous medical school in Córdoba, and a large population of immigrants from all over Europe. And,” he smiled, “a shortage of pharmacists!”
“But how will you manage? You don’t speak—” She had to think for a moment. “You don’t speak Spanish.”
“It’s like French, but less difficult.”
“You’ve already begun?”
He made a wry face and then said, with the precision with which Jascha did everything, “Ya estoy estudiando.”
Snowflakes swirled around them as she looked into his eyes, trying to figure out what he might be thinking—and what the words might have meant. Then Jascha bent his face down close to hers, closer than the two of them had ever been before. The ice that had formed on Sonya’s lashes melted in the warmth of their two faces almost touching. She could smell his anise-scented breath and sense the smoothness of his clean-shaven jaw. His arms, surprisingly strong, pulled her closer. Her back arched. Her hands inside her gloves—inside his coat—were beginning to thaw. His lips, slightly parted, touched hers, and her eyes fluttered shut as if against her will. She knew there was no music playing—but, still, it was as if she heard an orchestra. This, then, thought Sonya, is a kiss!
“I’ll write to you,” he said, “as soon as we’re settled.”
“Only then?”
“As soon as we reach Córdoba.”
***
In late spring, a letter arrived for Sonya from Argentina. Her hands were shaking as she read it. It’s March and yet the leaves on the trees are red and orange now, wrote Jascha, and the air has turned chilly, although it will never get as cold as our Russian winter. The cold is one thing I won’t ever regret leaving behind.
But did he regret leaving her behind? Sonya’s eyes raced down the page, rushing past further descriptions of weather and the landscape. And then she made herself back up and pay attention to every sentence, looking for the words she was desperate to read. My sister is to be married to a businessman she met on the boat, my dearest girl.
She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling a surge of hope. And then she started to read the sentence that followed, convinced it would contain a proposal of marriage. She read it a second time, noticing Jasha’s perfect handwriting, realizing that what he wrote was unmistakable. Will you come to the wedding?
His sister’s wedding? In what capacity, pray tell? As a guest? As a friend?
She read on. Father says that we can pay for your ticket. But what else does his father say about her? What sort of girl do they think she is, anyway?
Sonya forced herself to keep reading—not to give in to the sense of disappointment unfurling inside her. The pharmacy he bought is much livelier than our little shop in Kishinev. And yet they were among the more prosperous Jewish families of Kishinev. Are they millionaires now, able to pay for her ticket from halfway around the world? Do they think themselves too good, too rich and refined for the likes of Sonya, whose father sat rotting for ten years in a Russian prison only to be felled, on his release, by the flu? She, whose mother could not have managed without help from Daniel, who sends whatever he can, despite his own struggles as an apprentice lawyer in Saint Petersburg—where restrictions have grown ever tighter on the number of Jews admitted to the bar.
The wedding is to be held on the fifteenth day of November. You will leave Russia when the snows are deep and arrive in a world filled with blossoming jacaranda trees. Their blossoms are purple rather than magenta—but, still, I think you would find them beautiful. Springtime in the month of November—can you imagine? Everything here is upside-down.
There were more words about the city where they’d settled and Jascha’s progress with Spanish, which had been hastened by someone he’d met on the boat. He wrote of the medical school and the exams he’d need to pass before he enrolled.
It made Sonya want to scream with frustration. She knew Jascha loved her. He’d shown her—my God, she thought, the way he’d kissed her! Had his father convinced him to write like this, leaving his options open—without an offer of marriage? Did Jascha hope to win his father’s blessing for the match with Sonya there, by his side?
Or had Jascha’s feelings for her changed? Had he met someone else? She reread the part about the person he’d met on the boat, who’d helped him with his Spanish, wondering if that person had been attractive and young. Perhaps a Jewish girl from a much better family than Sonya’s.
She had felt so certain of Jascha’s love for her. Why couldn’t he have written in a way that would assure their future together? That would give her the courage to say yes to his proposal to come to him.
Sonya told herself to wait—to be patient. Perhaps that first letter was written in haste. Perhaps it was written with Jascha’s father looking over his shoulder.
She waited and waited for another letter. She was unable to elicit any advice from her mother, who said that Sonya must really make the decision by herself.
Days and weeks passed—and no other letters arrived.
***
Nadia finally offered the opinion that it would perhaps be dangerous—both to Sonya’s person and her reputation—to undertake such a journey by herself, in response to such an uncertain proposal.
If someone else could accompany her, that would be one thing. But Nadia couldn’t possibly leave the shop with Faya, who hadn’t the foggiest idea how to run things—and Faya flat-out refused to go to South America. She had a terror of ocean voyages—and absolutely no desire to travel in a country that was likely to be populated by savages.
Nadia was dead-set against interrupting the trajectory of Daniel’s brilliant career in Saint Petersburg to send him off on such an errand.
For the ten-thousandth time in her life, Sonya reproached God for taking the one person in this world who could have been her best companion and friend. Between the two of them, if her twin sister had lived, they would have been able to figure out exactly how to respond to Jascha’s proposal. Zaneta could have traveled with her to Argentina, making the journey right and proper, no matter what Jascha’s intentions turned out to be. Or Zaneta could have reassured her that Kishinev was the place where Sonya was meant to stay. Where happiness awaited her.
***
Kishinev was a large enough town—but in so many ways, it was like a village. Sonya saw the same people—and witnessed the same sights and sounds—every day. She didn’t have to look out the window to know whose cart or carriage was rumbling past the shop. She could often identify people merely by how they made the little bell ring when they opened the shop door.
Kishinev was all she had ever known. How could she ever feel at home in a foreign place, with strangers whose native tongue wasn’t Russian?
She loved the color and emotional range of Yiddish but associated the language with people from the shtetls, who looked askance at the idea of assimilation. Russia was her home—as much as the Jews were always seen as aliens within the Empire, forced to live under separate rules, with far fewer opportunities. With the constant fear of being blamed, once again, for whatever hardship was visited by Nature or the tsar on the Russian people.
Sonya felt Russian, even though she also felt, as a Russian-Jew, that she was different.
The newly crowned young tsar, widely criticized for being weaker than his father, seemed to take special solace in turning the people’s wrath away from him and toward the Jews instead. Crop shortages, famine, an unsolved murder, oppressive taxes, the closure of factories—the young Tsar Nicholas and his advisors found a way, every time, to promulgate the idea that if only the Jews were gone, life would be so much better in Russia. Idealistic and energetic Jewish men, who excelled in the few professions open to them, were characterized as leeches and bloodsuckers. When times were particularly bad, the government encouraged Russians to attack their Jewish neighbors, with whom—especially in Kishinev—they usually co-existed in peace.
But what was life, if not unfair? Daniel, now married and with a child on the way, was still relegated to practicing as an apprentice lawyer, even though he was regarded as one of the most distinguished legal minds in the capital. He treated his mother and sisters to fascinating descriptions of Saint Petersburg when he and Klara came to visit—of the glorious architecture, the poets and writers in the cafes, the brilliant new plays in the theatres, and the unlimited wealth, power, and influence enjoyed by the nobility and their circle.
The Jews who lived in Saint Petersburg, all of them by special dispensation, were themselves, by and large, well off and well educated. How different her life would have been, Sonya thought, if Jascha’s family hadn’t emigrated to Argentina—if they’d managed to get him into medical school in the capital instead.
Daniel had acquired as a client one of the teachers at the Mariinsky Ballet School, helping her through a fraught and complicated contract negotiation—and yielding, for Daniel and his wife, occasional tickets to the Imperial Russian Ballet. His mother and Sonya asked all sorts of questions about the costumes of the dancers. They were especially riveted by gossip about the new tsar’s protégée—reputedly, his mistress—Mathilde Kschessinska, who danced as the Mariinsky’s prima ballerina assoluta and had no shame about wearing the out-size gems that Nicholas gave her, even when she was supposed to be playing the part of a dirt-poor peasant girl. She flaunted her privileged status and flirted with him openly, whether or not the tsar was sitting in the royal box with his new German bride.
Daniel made his mother and sisters laugh till tears ran down their faces, telling about how Kschessinska arranged to have a flock of chickens released on stage during the debut of a new young rival, who nonetheless won the collective heart of everyone in the audience. “Someday soon,” Daniel told them, “I’ll take you to the ballet. Once I’m admitted to the bar, life will change for all of us—you’ll see!”
But life was changing for them, all on its own.
Nadia coughed so much, night and day, that she only rarely joined Sonya in the workshop now. Customers had taken to consulting the daughter, instead of the mother, when they wanted to order new clothes.