Pavlova turns to her maid, demanding to know where she found this doppelgänger of her seamstress.
“In the big dressing-room, Anna Mateyevna!” Crossing herself again, Zlata adds, “What can it mean?”
Vassily Zuikov, Diaghilev’s valet, speaks up from the hallway. “She is Jeannette Dupres, one of the coryphées for the Paris Opera. We hired her as an extra dancer for Les Sylphides.
“You’re well informed,” Diaghilev mutters.
“She’s uncommonly pretty!” the valet mutters back at him, caressing the waxed tips of his black moustache and raising his eyebrows behind Sonya’s back.
Little Baila, holding her mother’s skirts around her like a curtain, waits till she has the valet’s attention and then sticks her tongue out at him.
“Well, never mind,” Diaghilev says. “Come, come,” he adds in his public voice, clapping his hands at everyone as if shooing chickens.
Taking note of the tunic with its double row of straight pins, Pavlova looks with horror at Sonya. “It’s not done yet?” When Sonya doesn’t answer but only stands there in a daze, Pavlova shouts, “Have you gone deaf?”
Diaghilev seems to notice Sonya for the first time since she got up off the floor. He takes a closer look at her through his monocle, as if to check for signs of disease before approaching her. “There, there, courage, my dear,” he says, leading her, with her little girl in tow, to one of four chairs ranged around a table littered with playing cards, cigarettes, and coins. “You’ll be able to get this done in no time, won’t you?”
Sitting, holding her daughter close, Sonya looks up at the impresario, his jet-black hair sporting a stripe of pure white, his waist cinched in and his clothing perfectly elegant and in style.
From her lower vantage point, Baila notices that one of his shoes has a little gap at the front, where the stitching attaching it to the sole has started to come undone. She wonders if his socks get wet when he walks through puddles. Because she knows this secret about the big tall man, she feels rather sorry for him. She wonders if it would be all right for her to give him some of the coins that are scattered across the little table. She wonders if anyone would notice if she picked up one or two of them for herself. She is thinking about the darling little puppy she saw for sale on the rue des Rosiers.
“Do you have a sewing basket here?” the big tall man says to her mother, speaking as if he were speaking to a child.
Baila, at the right level to notice, retrieves what she recognizes as one of her mother’s sewing baskets from underneath the dancer’s dressing table.
“What a lovely little girl you are,” Pavlova says. “Come here, dear.”
Baila watches her mother start to thread a needle. Then doing what she’s seen countless ballerinas do, both in Paris and Saint Petersburg, she walks up to Pavlova and drops a little curtsey.
“Charming,” says the dancer, taking a chocolate bon-bon from a lacquer box and dropping it into the child’s hand. “Perhaps you’ll be a ballerina one day.”
Baila retreats behind her mother’s skirt again to savor her prize. She is a little afraid of Madame Pavlova. But she likes the big man with the stripe in his hair and the broken shoe. The chocolate is the most delicious thing she has ever tasted.
Sewing and pulling out pins as she goes, Sonya says to the impresario, “Can’t someone please go after her, sir? I’ve been waiting for this moment for such a long time!” She uses the back of her hand to wipe away the tears that are welling up in her eyes. She wishes someone had offered her a chocolate.
“There is no need, Madame,” says Diaghilev. “Your sister will be keenly aware of the honor she’s won in getting this job, dancing on the same stage with the great Pavlova.”
The ballerina steals a look at herself in the mirror and raises her chin just a little, which makes her neck look even longer.
“But if she doesn’t come back—” says Sonya, gazing out into the twilight of the corridor.
“She would not think of missing the dress rehearsal,” Diaghilev assures her, “any more than she would think of failing to show up on pay-day—which isn’t, by the way, till next Friday. You’ll have ample opportunity to speak with her.”
The dancer turns away from the mirror. “Shall we get you a ticket for one of the performances, Sonya? And one for your little girl?” Baila peeks her head out again. “Hello, darling,” Pavlova says to her. “Do you speak French?” she asks her in Russian. Baila nods.
Using her best and smallest invisible stitch, Sonya is making short work of attaching the bias-cut patch she cut out, ironed, and pinned, earlier in the day. Looking up, she says, “I would love to attend a performance!” When Baila tugs at her sleeve, she adds, “Both of us would.”
“Excellent,” Diaghilev says. “Vassily, see that it is done.”
Just then, the regisseur, reeking of cigarettes, pokes his bald head in at the door. “Good evening, Madame Pavlova,” he says, exhaling two serpentine trails of smoke from his nostrils as he bows. Squinting one eye, he scans the dressing room for any possible projectiles within the star’s reach. “Mr. Fokine would like to respectfully request—” He puts his hand on the doorknob and says over his shoulder, “that you allow Madame Karsavina adequate time for her bow, at the end of Cléopâtre.”
Pavlova stamps her foot and swears, first in Russian, then in French. The regisseur shuts the door behind him just in time to avoid getting beaned by one of the ballerina’s toe-shoes.
***
As soon as Sonya is finished with the repairs to Pavlova’s costume, she hurries home with Baila, barely paying attention to the child as they make their way through the welter of carriages and pedestrians—ignoring the headache that has blossomed since her collapse in Pavlova’s dressing-room.
Yes, she keeps telling herself—I was right all along! She lives. She lives here! And then, My God, she’s a dancer! How amazed Mother would have been!
In the same instant, she realizes that she must have also been right, that day when she’d first seen Paul Poiret at the train station—when he’d first seen her. It’s too awful to contemplate all the lies he’s told her since then—and how willing she was, in the end, to believe him.
Zaneta, in the flesh. How beautiful she was! How glamorous.
Bursting through their door with Baila, Sonya sets about putting together an omelet for the children’s supper. She doesn’t fix anything for herself but retreats to her room with some hot water and a sponge. What to wear? She puts on her best dress, another sample that Paul had given her. She finds a very old pot of lip rouge—and sticks her head out the door to ask Naomi if she can use her paints.
“My paints, Mama?”
“Your paints, child. Hurry up, please. Some brushes too.”
It’s much harder work than she might have thought. But when she’s done, at least by candlelight the effect is just about what Sonya hoped it would be. She finds a length of silk and, just as Paul had done when designing on a model, she wraps it turban-style around her head. She puts on the pair of gold earrings Klara lent her for Daniel’s big soirée and then gave to her again, for keeps, when she left them to live in Paris.
Really, the resemblance now is astonishing. Sonya waits till the bell tower chimes eight—and then opens the door just enough to call out, “To bed now, you three!”
“But what about our story?” Olga wants to know.
“Aren’t you going to kiss us goodnight?” cries Baila.
“Tonight you must kiss each other goodnight. Olga, tell your sisters a story.”
“Can’t we see you?” asks Naomi with a hint of mischief in her voice.
“I need to go out briefly. I’ll come in and kiss you as soon as I return. But,” she adds, “you had better be asleep by then.”
All three girls run to the window and look out after Sonya leaves, trying to catch a glimpse of her on the street below. All they see is an elegant lady, clutching at her turban and running as fast as she can in high-heeled shoes in the direction of the Saint-Paul Metro station.
“Is that Mama?” asks Baila.
Naomi clucks her tongue instead of answering no. In just a year, she has come to sound and look exactly like a French girl. She wonders what her mother is up to. She shoots a look at Olga, warning her to say nothing.
***
Sonya knows that Paul will be at dinner at this hour, either at home with his family or out with friends. As she hoped, Émile Rousseau, his bookkeeper and business manager, is working late and lets her inside when she rings.
“Madame Jeannette—” he begins in a less than friendly tone of voice. And then he recognizes Sonya and clears his throat. “I beg your pardon, Sonya. My mind was on my ledger books. Monsieur Poiret isn’t here.”
Sonya’s heart is racing. “Oh, how silly of me!” She wishes he hadn’t recognized her so quickly—but now she has the confirmation she needed. Paul knows about Zaneta—he knows Zaneta! He has known all along and he has kept this knowledge from Sonya.
She would like to strangle Paul Poiret, to see him die a painful death. “I came to see if—” Her voice trails off as a couple more pieces of the picture fall into place. “I came to see if I could borrow—the evening bandeau I was working on the other day. The one with the aigrette made of spun glass.”
She can see Émile’s mind working, trying to discern whether the name Jeannette had meant anything to Sonya. She wants to leave, as quickly as possible. She wishes she had never come out tonight—wishes now that she didn’t know. “But perhaps I’m deluding myself to believe that I can wear such an elegant thing without appearing ridiculous! I see now, Émile, that my idea was a mistaken one.”
“But, au contraire, Sonya, I can picture you precisely in that headdress. If you’ll forgive my boldness in saying so, I believe it would be particularly stunning when worn with Monsieur Poiret’s midnight blue evening dress; the one with the empire waist and diaphanous sleeves. I predict there will be half a dozen new orders for the dress after you’ve worn it.” He pauses. “You are going somewhere special tonight?”
“Yes,” she lies. “I’ve been invited to a rather grand soirée.”
Sonya thinks, Why not take the dress and never bring it back? No matter that it’s one of the newest and most expensive models. She deserves her revenge—she deserves much more than this. What Paul owes her is incalculable.
What a fool she had been, to believe his tale—to doubt the certainty of her intuition, from the very first moment he’d spoken to her at the Gare du Nord. Her certainty that he’d mistaken her for her twin.
What was it, she wonders, about powerful men that makes them feel entitled to satisfy their urges, without the slightest bit of consideration for the wreckage they leave in their wake?
Sonya can’t bear now to look backwards, at her own wake—to think about Baila. To think about Zaneta and Paul. To think about Asher! She tells herself she will deal with all these feelings later. Right now, she must look straight ahead.
She smiles demurely at Émile Rousseau, a man whose probity she trusts. One of those rare trustworthy men. “If you really think he would approve the idea.”
“I’ll just fetch the garments in question…”
“No need, Émile. I’ll wrap them up myself and go home again to change. It wouldn’t do to show up at a Ballets Russes event with shopping bags, would it?”