I can’t decide what to take with me,” says Naomi, standing before her little suitcase, half-full now.
“But, Noni, do you have to leave?” Olga is at the stove in René’s abandoned kitchen, trying to remember whether it’s chicken stock or water she’s supposed to use for the lentil stew—and wondering, if it’s stock, what the possibilities are for finding some, or finding a chicken, with so many shops shuttered, their shelves empty.
“I can make a difference in Normandy!” Naomi calls from the other room.
Why is it, Olga wonders, that Poiret’s plans, no matter how altruistic they sound, always involve some benefit to his fashion empire? Besides this initiative for the Martines—having them set up workshops to teach new skills to wounded soldiers—he was also trying to press his design for a new and better uniform on the French high command. Naomi, though, only thinks good of him. He is, Olga knows, almost like a father to her.
When they sit down to eat their last supper together, Naomi asks Olga for the hundredth time whether she won’t come to Normandy too.
“Someone has to stay here and report the truth,” says Olga. “Every day, a messenger comes to tell us what we can and can’t report on.”
“Will you stay until the war is over?”
Olga shakes her head. “I don’t know. I suppose I’ll stay as long as the newspaper allows me to write for them. And then, who can say?”
“Mama is desperate for you, for both of us, to come to Argentina.”
“And I miss her desperately,” says Olga.
They’d decided, together, to encourage their mother to pursue her old dream of love and happiness. But both were a little skeptical about the circumstances—a new country, a new language, another woman’s children, and a man Sonya hadn’t known since he was seventeen. They wrote to her, as promised, every day. But, between the two of them, they thought of their mother’s absence as a kind of vacation she was taking from her real life. Both of them thought she deserved it—and hoped it would renew both her strength and her sense of joy.
They eat for a while in silence while Olga thinks about what a wonderful thing it is to have a sister with whom one feels close and safe and loved.
“Do you think it’s true,” Naomi says, “about Mama and Monsieur Poiret?”
“Even if it is true, I don’t see why our aunt would feel compelled to tell Baila. Why should she ever have to know such a thing, especially since Mama thought it best—if it is true—to keep it to herself?”
They’d had a letter from Baila the day before, posted from New York City. Both she and Jeannette were dancing with the company now, which was such a rag-tag version of what it had been before, in the glory days, before Diaghilev fired Nijinsky.
No one had ever expected that the war would still be raging—or that it would have spread so far, on so many fronts. Or that so many men, on both sides, would have lost their lives and limbs and sight. Or that Paris would have been brought so low.
The next morning, at the Gare Saint Lazare, Naomi puts her suitcase on the train—and then jumps down to the platform to embrace her sister one last time.
“I’ll write to you every day. The war will surely be over before the end of the year,” she says, “and then we’ll all go back to our lives—and everything will be as it was again.”
Olga is terrified that nothing will ever be as it was again. She looks at Naomi’s face in a way she never has before, noticing and cataloging every detail of her eyes, her nose, her pretty lips, her lovely skin, and the delicacy of her underlying bones. How is it that she never really looked before? She clings hard to her sister’s hands, long-fingered, like their mother’s.
“You look so much like Mama, Noni! I feel her presence, with us here today.”
“I always feel her presence,” says Naomi, “like a bright, warm light.”