Sonya wakes to the sound of rain—more rain. Would it never stop raining? Their street has become a river. Going out to buy bread incurs the risk of drowning. The Seine has overflowed its banks, making it impossible for all but the flattest boats to pass beneath the bridges.
The boat owners are the lucky ones, able to row or pole their way from place to place around Paris. Sonya thinks about the pretty little boat Paul Poiret used once to ferry them to his cottage in Meudon. She could imagine him arriving at her doorstep, standing up in the bow, a wicker basket filled to the brim with delicious food.
She stirs herself to light the stove so that her daughters will at least have a bit of warmth when she wakes them. But why wake them at all, when she has nothing today to feed them?
Two days ago, a little dinghy tied up to the railing just beneath their balcony. Two of the baker’s boys were hawking damp loaves of bread that Sonya and her neighbors were all too happy to buy, lowering baskets from their windows. They bought all there was, along with a small amount of butter and cheese.
There’s no sign of the boat today, only a large fawn-colored dog, paddling madly to stay afloat in the churning black waters, its nose in the air.
Olga joins her at the window, her glasses perched crookedly on her nose, her flannel nightgown longer, thicker, and warmer than the nightgowns of most of the ten-year-old girls of Paris. Sonya tells herself that at least she keeps her children well clothed.
Olga slips her hand inside her mother’s. They both watch, gasping without being aware they’re doing so, as the dog, still struggling, disappears around the corner. Sonya had never noticed that their street, which seemed quite flat, sloped downhill.
“Please, Mother—let’s not tell Baila about the dog. It will upset her so!”
Sonya always senses Asher in this child—his keen mind, his clear-eyed view of the world. The fierceness of his desire to keep all of them safe.
She squeezes Olga’s hand—and, just then, a bit of blue sky appears, like a sign from God.
The rain lightens. Will it stop?
As they stand there, hand in hand, a piece of furniture floats into view—a tall bookshelf, half-sunk like a shipwrecked boat. With an audible roar, the waters surge—and, riveted, they see another bookshelf, just like the first one, rocking crazily back and forth as the current carries it past their building.
A few small rectangular objects glide into view from up the street on the swiftly moving river-road. And then a dense parade of books floats by, some open, some still closed, bobbing among splinters of wood on the dark river that was, a week ago, the rue des Rosiers.
Olga has begun to sob. Surely, Sonya thinks, her daughter can’t possibly remember the smell and sight of the ruined and smoldering books torn from the shelves of Jewish homes and scattered, their pages fluttering in air filled with feathers and smoke, along the streets of Kishinev. Olga was only a toddler then—and she was fast asleep, her face pressed into Sonya’s shoulder. Is it possible, she wonders, that Olga—precocious even as a baby—opened her eyes as they’d rushed past the ruins of everything they’d held dear? That she’d seen, although Sonya had tried so hard not to let her children see, that nightmare vision of Asher’s corpse, there among the other dead—laid out, arms akimbo, faces bloodied and contorted with their final looks of horror?
Sonya wonders if it’s Asher’s spirit that stirs in Olga now. Olga could withstand the sight of the poor, struggling, drowning dog, even though the sight of it was horrible. But to see these books, beautiful leather-bound, cloth-bound treasures of knowledge and words, their pages turning to pulp—their truth, their beauty, about to be lost forever—is too much for this word-loving little girl. She rips the glasses from her face, places her childish palms against the steamed-up window, and lets herself sink down, the glass squeaking against her cheek, until she’s level with her mother’s knees. “I can’t bear it,” she whimpers.
Naomi joins them at the window. “Oh dear,” she says, looking out at the books floating by—and then down at her melodramatic little sister.
Disentangling herself from her children, Sonya takes her hat and cloak from the hook by the door. “I’m going out to find some food for us,” she says as she buttons her cloak. They watch her climb up onto a stool in the kitchen and take down from the top shelf the stoneware crock where she keeps the housekeeping money. “No one is to leave this house—and you are to let no one in. Keep an eye on Baila. Do you understand me?”
Naomi pipes up dutifully, “Yes, Mother.” Olga, still overcome with grief, says nothing.
Sonya opens the window, letting in a blast of rain and wind. “Do you understand me, Olga?” she shouts, just before the wind blows her skirt up over her head. She yanks it down, gathering the hem into a fistful of fabric before swinging one leg out over the sill. She makes a grab at her hat just in time to keep it from blowing off her head, then hurls it back through the open window. Her face and hair are already drenched, streaming with rain. She hangs onto the sash with both hands until her boots make contact with the makeshift wooden sidewalk, more than the length of her body below the sill. Sonya gets some splinters in her hand as she lowers the rest of herself down and shouts up at her daughters to shut the window behind her. Wiping the rain out of her eyes, she looks up and down what was once their street, but there’s not a boat in sight.
Olga and Naomi, astonished looks on their faces, are watching their mother. Both they and she know that she can’t swim. She’ll surely drown if she falls. Sonya wonders if she’s just done the most reckless thing she’s ever done so far among the many reckless things she’s done in her life. And then, already out of breath, she begins to pick her way with care along the waterlogged wooden planks, finding handholds wherever she can along the sides of the buildings.
***
Olga continues to sit on the cold floor by the window while Naomi goes into their bedroom to comfort Baila, who is crying both for food and her mother.
It was only recently that Olga read and reread De Charmette’s epic poem, “Orleanide,” about Joan of Arc, who was herself of such a tender age when she rode into battle to rescue France. Olga has the sudden inspiration to follow her brave mother outside—to rescue whatever precious books she can from the flood below!
It seems an excellent idea—and she is, in any case, so tired of being stuck inside.
She writes a farewell note, using the florid penmanship she’s been working long and hard to give the appearance of a grown-up’s writing: I leave you for a noble cause, she writes. God willing, I shall return. Naomi will no doubt laugh at her—but she doesn’t care. Hiking up her nightgown and slipping on her boots, she grabs an empty flour-sack from the pantry.
The window is easy enough to open. But she slips and falls when she tries to lower herself down from the sill, barely keeping herself from tumbling off the edge of the raised wooden walkway. Her ankle, injured, starts throbbing, and her heart is thumping in her chest. The walkway is so slippery, and there’s so little in the way of railings, that she crawls rather than trying to limp and risk losing her balance again.
The pain in her ankle is far worse than she could ever have imagined. She has to go a long way and crawl quickly, getting splinters in her knees as she labors to catch up with the flotilla of books.
The rain falls harder and she starts to wonder if it hadn’t been such a brilliant idea, after all. The reality of feeling so vulnerable and in such pain, in the middle of the storm, is entirely different from what she imagined. She crawls as fast as she can manage, until she gets a little ahead of the books and comes upon a ladder lashed to the sidewalk.
Her thick white flannel nightgown is torn and as blackened as if someone had washed it in ashes. She thinks about how angry her mother would be. And then an image rises before her eyes of Jeanne d’Arc similarly clothed in filthy rags as she stood, bravely, tied to a stake, watching the flames get closer and closer. Feeling their heat.
As Olga climbs down the ladder, every other step she takes is accompanied by an agonizing pain. It makes her think of Hans Christian Anderson’s story of the mermaid who drank a potion to transform her tail into human legs, who traded the power of speech for the ability to dance—and yet each step she took felt like the stab of a knife in her foot. The thought of this, even more than the pain, makes Olga’s eyes fill with tears.
The black waters rush and whirl around the submerged bottom rungs of the ladder. Olga wonders if it’s possible to learn to swim all at once—or if she’s destined, if she loses her grip, to sink beneath the waters and drown. How grief-stricken her mother will be—her mother and both her sisters too. She thinks of the fairytale again, and how inconsolable she’d been after her mother had finished reading the story to her, revealing that the mermaid, for all her hope and sacrifice, died unrecognized by the prince.
Unlike Naomi, who had gotten over it quickly, Olga had cried for days and days.
She doesn’t dare climb down to the very bottom of the ladder. Squatting, clutching the ladder with one hand—holding the burlap bag in her teeth—she leans out as far as she can reach with the other. With a perilous stretch, she manages to grab one book and drop it into the bag, which is suddenly much heavier. She plucks a second book out of the water as it floats by. The bag is too heavy now to hold in her teeth. Wincing at the smell, she pins the sodden bag to her side with her elbow, diminishing the distance she can reach out with her free hand. Shivering, she sees a smaller book approaching, one with a gold-embossed illustration of flowers on the cover. Leaning out as far as she can without letting go, she can’t do anything more than touch it before it sluices by, spinning now. And then she feels her fingers slipping on the ladder rung in the same moment that she sees something dead floating toward her, a cat or a dog, bloated beyond recognition.
***
Sonya returns home sodden and triumphant, bearing two loaves, a bottle of milk, a handful of barley, some greens, and a shin-bone the butcher sold her for a wildly inflated price.
When she sees that the window is unlatched, and then finds Olga’s note, she screams at Naomi until she’s hoarse and both Naomi and Baila are sobbing hysterically. And then she leaves again, after taking Olga’s cloak from the hook by the door. Olga, that impossible dreamer, hadn’t even thought to take her cloak.
The bit of blue sky was only a false promise. It’s raining again, harder, if possible, than it rained before. The raised wooden sidewalks, so hastily cobbled together, seem to have little chance of staying intact as the waters continue to rise. Sonya battles her way through this latest downpour, holding on to anything she can.
The rain makes it difficult to see beyond a few feet in front of her. The wind and cold penetrate Sonya’s very bones—and yet the air is mild in comparison to the winters in Saint Petersburg. There all but the poorest people dressed for the cold in hats and furs, if they could afford them—but even the humblest would go hungry rather than forgo the necessary protection of an overcoat, even one that was bought secondhand. In the coldest winters, men were sometimes murdered for their warm clothes.
Sonya calls Olga’s name so loudly and so long that she hardly has any voice left when, finally, she finds her. Filthy and bedraggled—shivering and looking genuinely scared—Olga is hanging on tight to a Gothic pillar, a dripping sack weighed down with something heavy pressed against her narrow chest. The murky waters swirl around her knees.
“Oh, you foolish girl!” is all Sonya can say, between sobs, as she embraces her child. Olga doesn’t let go of her sack.
“Madame! Madame!” a passing boatman cries. “Can I help you?”
This one charges nothing for the service he renders.
Olga’s skin has a bluish cast. She’s so exhausted, and limping so badly, that the boatman has to carry her up to their window. He refuses the coins Sonya tries to press into his hands.
“But you are all alone,” he says, taking in the plain, poor rooms and the lack of a man. “Is there some message I can deliver for you—some relative or friend who could come to your aid?” He looks at Olga. “She will need a doctor.”
Sonya doesn’t even know precisely where Jeannette is living now. Somewhere in the eighteenth arrondissement, if the gossip is true. Monsieur Blum is traveling. Pavlova is back in Saint Petersburg. Karsavina is in London.
Who else can she possibly turn to? Sighing, choosing her words with care, Sonya scribbles a note to Paul Poiret—and then gives the boatman the address of the great couturier’s famous mansion on rue d’Antin.