Paul arrives at the flat an hour before Jeannette is due. He brings an enormous bouquet of lilies and tuberoses and a basket of food. He instructs the nurse to see to it that the two older children are shod in boots and dressed warmly enough to spend a few hours out of doors. And then he enters the room where Sonya has been in a deep sleep, making that horrible sound she’d started making the day before—a sound like the ocean, each labored breath like a wave washing heavily up against the shore and receding again.
The sight of her is deeply disturbing to him. He doesn’t understand how the doctor, who performed, it would seem, such a miracle with the child, has yet been unable to turn the course of the illness in Sonya. He thinks about his wife, so precious to him—and little Rosine, and all the other children he hopes they’ll make one day. It’s indescribably painful to even entertain the idea that death could come to any of those he loves so well.
Sonya is also dear to him. He has, he knows, a capacious heart. Gently, tentatively, he bends to plant a last kiss on her forehead—then crosses himself. He’s so little accustomed to doing so these days. “God bless you, Sonya. Jeannette is on her way now. She’ll be here soon.” Sonya makes no indication that she can hear him, sleeping on, making that terrible death rattle.
All three of Sonya’s daughters are sitting close together in the other room, dressed in their hats and coats. “Go in now and kiss your mother,” he says to Naomi and Olga, touching each child’s head. “We’re going out for a ride in my little boat—and a stroll, if possible, in the Bois de Boulogne.”
“And I, Monsieur Poiret? Am I not to go too?”
“Next time,” he says. “For now, Baila—your name is Baila, isn’t it? What a lovely name.” He cocks his head, looking at her more closely. There’s something familiar about the child. Something that reminds him of Rosine. His heart contracts again with love for his child.
He truly abhors death—death and illness. “For now, you’ll stay here with your mother and the nurse.” He wonders what Jeannette’s angle is, wanting to see this child but not the others. It’s imperative—it’s clear that it’s going to become imperative—that Jeannette take an interest in all three of them. Who else did they have? He turns to the nurse and says, “Under no circumstances is the child to leave. Do you understand me?”
The nurse, who is being paid to follow his instructions, nods her assent.
When the two older girls emerge, ashen-faced, from the bedroom, Paul hurries them downstairs. He lifts them one at a time over the flooded threshold, up onto the raised walkway, helping them down the ladder and into his boat. There he changes into a captain’s hat before manning the oars.
***
After they’ve gone as far as they can in the boat, Paul ties it up and puts his bowler back on. Hailing a carriage, he instructs the driver to take them as close as possible to the Parc de Bagatelle.
What a relief for the two girls, to be outside again after being stuck for so long indoors, in and around the sickroom, locked up with all their most horrible fears.
It’s thrilling to watch the sights around them. The horses, up to their knees in water, toss their heads and snort as they pick their way over ground they can’t see. Their carriage is surrounded by boats and rafts of every description. Well-dressed ladies and gentlemen walk in single file along the raised sidewalks, holding onto their hats, using their umbrellas for balance. Wide-bottomed matrons are coaxed up and down ladders, their huge skirts ballooning out behind them in the wind. Scowling workmen carry furniture and supplies wrapped up in bed-sheets. Medics carry people on stretchers. Everyday Parisians are going about their business, walking like high-wire artists from the circus along the narrow, rickety, makeshift walkways.
The Bois de Boulogne is more swamp than park now, with leafless trees rising up from the black waters. Their driver finds a place where the pathway is dry enough—and Paul hands the girls down, one at a time.
There are no roses blooming, of course, in February. But the pond is already filled with the gold and yellow blooms of water lilies.
Naomi is especially attentive to the sight. “It would, I think, be wonderful to paint here, en plein air.”
“You are—”
“Naomi, monsieur. Don’t you remember? I was the one who came to fetch you last month, when my sister was so ill.”
“Of course. You’re the twelve-year-old—Sonya’s first-born. Your name escaped me only momentarily.” He takes a better look at her. “So you have an interest in art—perhaps you hope to be an artist someday.”
Olga pipes up. “Oh. she’s forever painting flowers and vines and that sort of thing. Never faces. Isn’t that right, Noni?”
“Yes. I like colors best. Bright colors and designs. I very much liked seeing the fabrics Mama worked with, when she was working for you, Monsieur Poiret.”
“A few of Mama’s friends have wanted to buy Noni’s paintings.”
Naomi demurs, “They’re just designs. It would be lovely, though, to see them made into upholstery fabrics or wallpaper. Some people might, I suppose, want to buy them.”
Paul is silent, possessed by a new idea—although he says nothing of it. After a while, he turns to Olga. “And what of you? You seem like a very intelligent sort of girl.”
“Is that because I wear glasses, monsieur? People often make that assumption. But, really, a near-sighted girl is just as likely to be stupid as a girl who sees with the acuity of an eagle.”
He stops to take a better look at her. “And your ambitions are—?”
“I should like to be a writer. Not a poet or a novelist but someone who writes social commentary and theater reviews.” She pauses, furrowing her brow. “Perhaps I might like to try to be a playwright one day.”
“How old did you say you were? Are you a child—or simply an adult who is very small?”
“That is amusing, monsieur. On my next birthday, I will be eleven years old. I was born at the turn of the century.”
He looks in turn at Naomi, who pipes up, “And I was born two years before—in the last century. It makes me sound very old, doesn’t it?” When neither he nor Olga says anything more, Naomi asks, looking down at the ground, “Can you tell us, Monsieur Poiret—is our mother going to die?”
They watch a duck with a dozen or so ducklings in her wake cross the path and leap, as if falling, into the pond, all of them gliding away without a sound.
“All of us will die one day, my child. And none of us can know when that day will be.”
He wonders, as soon as he has said it, about the truth of this pronouncement.
How could it ever come to pass that Paul Poiret will one day cease to be? In Paris, as in all the places in the world that matter, fashion rules supreme. He is only becoming more and more famous and successful. His is not a star that will burn brightly for a while, only to be extinguished. The gods have given him the most highly coveted gift of all: like all the greatest artists throughout history, he possesses the power to make the world see female beauty, and female allure, through his eyes.
Yes, his body—despite his amazing constitution—is mortal. He cannot deny it. But he knows in every cell of his being that no one will ever forget either his name or his art.
Poor Sonya! What will she leave behind but these children? He resolves then and there to be of use to them, if Jeannette will allow it—for surely Jeannette will rise up to her responsibility. Even if Jeannette fails in this, he will find the means to help them, anyway. It’s unthinkable that Sonya’s three lovely girls should be left alone and undefended, without a protector.
***
Jeannette hardly sleeps at all on the night train from Monte Carlo, staring at her own reflection in the dark window—wondering what will happen when she reaches Sonya’s apartment. Who will be there. How she’ll be received. Whether Sonya will be alive or dead.
She removed her makeup, and changed out of her costume, in the little toilet compartment on the train. There wasn’t anything suitable among her things to put on—nothing black.
In the backseat of the car Paul has sent for her, she thinks about the black dress her father brought to her, on that day he told her that her mother was dead. On that day when everything good and sweet in her life disappeared, in an instant, until she found ballet. Until she ran away to Paris. Until—for a while, at least—she found Paul.
Waiting for someone to open Sonya’s door, Jeannette’s heart is beating fast. She hopes against hope the door will open to reveal Baila, the child she has come to think of as a precious gift that was meant for her but given to someone else.
Jeannette thought all night about how uniquely well suited she is to bring comfort and healing to this little girl. By virtue of Jeannette’s own loss, as well as her resemblance to Sonya, Jeannette will be able to help the child through this pain that Jeannette understands only too well. And Baila will fill that empty place inside Jeannette, the place where she’s longed for someone to love her.
She knocks again, a little more forcefully. She hears voices, a scuffling of shoes. And then the door is opened—by Baila, her hair uncombed, her cheeks stained with tears.
Thrilled, Jeannette smiles down on her.
But the child’s expression isn’t even remotely friendly. She looks, Jeannette thinks, almost angry. Rather horrified that she’s expected to let her in.
***
Baila has seen Jeannette only once up close, that frightening day of her mother’s collapse in Madame Pavlova’s dressing-room. And then a second time, staring from far away at the ballerina, among the flock of other dancers on the stage, who so resembled her mother. The woman her mother had referred to—briefly, only once—as Baila’s auntie.
There had been no mention of her, after that night that was at first so magic and then so horrible—after they’d tried and failed to find the woman backstage. When they’d climbed the metal stairs and Baila felt her mother let go her hand. Felt herself in danger of being altogether abandoned.
And here is that woman now, in their doorway, while Baila’s mama lies in bed so ill. It can only mean that something even worse is about to happen.
***
The nurse, a black-clad sister of mercy, steps out from a darkened bedroom. “Come, child,” she says, leading Baila away, raising her eyes toward Jeannette and nodding at the gaping bedroom door.
Jeannette walks through, flinching when the door is closed shut behind her.
The furnishings of the room are shabbier than she expected. The beamed ceiling is low. The water-stained walls are covered in brightly colored paintings of flowers and other botanical fantasies made on sketchbook paper, affixed with thumbtacks. There’s a small window, framed by pretty curtains, looking out at the waterlogged masonry of the building next door. A pair of beeswax tapers in brass candlesticks flicker on the bedside table, alongside a huge vase of tuberoses and lilies that have filled the room with their heavy perfume.
Sonya is lying on her back, her eyes closed. Her hair has been arranged on the pillow, her nightdress is tidy, her hands are clasped under her bosom.
Jeannette drops to her knees at the bedside, crosses herself, and curses Paul for making her come all this way to see a corpse—and a corpse, no less, who is like a nightmare vision of her own death. No one should have to see such a sight, she tells herself. Her eyes fill with tears. The smell of the candles and flowers is making her feel sick.
She rushes to the window and struggles, unsuccessfully, to get it open. Breathing hard, she stands there until the wave of nausea passes.
And then she hears a sound, a faint rattling, rasping sound, like an ocean wave that slaps against a shingle beach and falls and sinks away. A hissing sound. Not from outside the door, or outside the window, but from the bed. Jeannette stands still and holds her breath and sees Sonya’s chest rise and fall.
Every other thought is pushed out of her head by the story Sonya told her, the story that had made Jeannette cry against her will, on that sickening day at the Café de la Paix, the last time they’d been face to face. Everyone had thought Jeannette was born dead. But then she and Sonya were put into a blanket together, and Jeannette came to life again. Sonya’s touch—her warmth—had brought her twin back to life, or at least that’s what Sonya believed.
Letting her cloak drop to the floor, Jeannette sits on the bed, lifts Sonya up, and wraps her arms around her back. The movements feel like a choreographic sequence in which Jeannette is partnered with someone feigning sleep. Someone like Karsavina when she danced her pas de deux with Nijinsky, in le Spectre de la Rose. Sonya’s head lolls against Jeannette’s bosom. “You see,” Jeannette says out loud, “I’m here now—or you would see, if you opened your eyes.”
Sonya’s eyes stay closed. Her breathing is so shallow as to almost be imperceptible. She’s warm, but her body is limp.
And then Jeannette remembers something else. The sensation of a heartbeat not her own but contained within the same space that holds her. Was it a memory of the womb they shared for nine wordless, sightless months of companionship? Or of that famous blanket in which they were swaddled as newborns? Or was it a memory of the crib where they slept together in a Russian orphanage?
It’s a feeling of being safe. Of being one of two.
And then she remembers a sound, also wordless—a sound of laughter. Silvery childish laughter. Jeannette feels a jolt of happiness, remembering. It’s like coming upon a treasure she never knew she possessed, right there among her own belongings. And then she remembers something else: a word.
She looks down at Sonya’s face. And although the eyes stay closed, Jeannette wills the lips to speak. “Say my name!” she commands.
It almost seems that Sonya has smiled in response, ever so slightly. But maybe it’s a trick of the candlelight.
Is she going mad? Jeannette can hear the name inside her head, spoken in a childish voice. The name wants to be said out loud, the foreign word that had meant nothing to her—a word she’d hated hearing—when Sonya first said it on that day, and every time she’d repeated it. Jeannette can hear it now, though it remains unspoken: her long-lost Russian name, shining up at her like a coin at the bottom of a wishing well.
Her name—is it her name?
Jeannette wonders whether she wouldn’t have done the same thing, in Sonya’s place. How like Sonya would Jeannette have been if her sister, rather than she, had been the one plucked out of the crib in the orphanage that day? Would Sonya have become a dancer and an anti-Semite, as Jeannette had been taught to be? What sort of person would Jeannette have been if she’d been raised a Russian Jew, in the bosom of a loving family, and then learning that her twin was alive, somewhere in France? Would Jeannette have done then exactly what Sonya had done in searching for her? It made sense that they’d both be drawn to the same man. And that the flowers on these walls were nearly all shades of magenta, Jeannette’s favorite color. The color she always imagines when she pictures her own soul.
She knows that Sonya, in whatever deep sleep she sleeps, can hear Jeannette’s heartbeat now—and she holds her tighter.
In the beginning, they were the same person—or not a person, but the tiny start of a person that would divide into two parts, each of them exactly the same. Wasn’t it logical to conclude that each of them would have the power to resurrect the other?
Jeannette takes a deep breath and says the word out loud then, pushing Sonya’s hair away from her ear, so she’ll be sure to hear her. She speaks in a voice she hardly recognizes as her own, a voice dredged up from the deepest regions of her past. Their past.
“Zaneta!” says Jeannette, speaking for her twin. And then she says, speaking for herself, “Sonya!”
***
For a long time—she can’t tell how long—Sonya has been trying to understand the sound that seems to be everywhere around her in the dark, a sound like the breath of the world itself. An inhalation and exhalation, but accompanied somehow by a fairylike percussion made of falling tiny flecks of gold—or sand. Yes! She understands in the same moment that her inner eyes open on a scene that she knows isn’t real—not in the sense of any reality she’s ever experienced before.
The moment explodes with buttery yellow light: the sea! Waves are breaking gently on a pebbled shore—and sinking, hissing as they recede.
She can smell salt spray and hear—what are those birds that look like paper airplanes, swirling and calling above her, bright white against the tender blue sky?
But she is not herself as she has always known herself—and this is not any land she has ever seen before. And there is Jascha, walking beside her, barefoot, his trousers rolled up to just below his knees. Jascha not as he was when she knew him, but much older. His still-abundant hair is the color of pewter now. His face is the same face, though a little heavier. He has a mustache. It suits him. He’s smiling at something straight ahead of them on the shoreline. He’s holding her hand.
Those children on the sand ahead of them—Sonya understands that they are her grandchildren. She always felt love for Jascha’s progeny, even when she never guessed that his children and grandchildren would also, in an alternate route to the end of her life, be hers. It makes no sense and it fills her with joy. If this is a dream, she doesn’t want to wake from it.
With difficulty—because every movement, even breathing, seems to require a superhuman strength—she looks down at her left hand, holding the fingers splayed out. Fingers that are no longer merely long and slender but also a little swollen, most of them, at the first joint. Her wedding ring, a simple gold band, is loose on her finger. She can see the veins beneath her skin, like rivers on a map. When she presses finger to thumb, the pads of both feel soft and pillowy.
The light is so bright that everything she sees seems ringed in gold.
How can it be that the moment of death is, in itself, as full and rich as a lifetime? The sense of this makes Sonya smile, but only slightly, as even the smallest movement requires such effort—and there is, she knows, barely anything left. It’s all she can do to keep her inner eyes open to the swirl of time and pathways, and the multiplicity of lives, both lived and unlived. The world as she’s always seen it has only been a shadow of everything that is.
Sonya feels herself slipping beneath the salty waters of a sun-warmed sea. She can’t breathe—but she’s not panicking. She feels a sense of peace as she drifts lower and lower, the water sluicing through her hair, the sound of bubbles in her ears.
And then another body bumps up against hers. She feels two arms embrace her, pulling her up again into the light and air.
Gasping, she opens her eyes and meets her sister’s gaze.
Jeannette’s entire face is suffused with a look of triumph. “And so,” she says. “Now we’re even!”