What Disappears, page 17
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.
Paris
1910
As soon as she’s given Olga a hot bath, and dressed her in a clean nightgown, Sonya tucks the exhausted child into bed. Naomi and Baila keep watch by her while Sonya sets about making the soup. She thinks about her own mother as she adds each ingredient—the shin-bone and onion, barley and salt—stirring and skimming and stealing looks out through the steamy windows. How she wishes she could be someone’s little girl again, protected and loved. She feels her own clothing first grow cold and then eventually begin to dry.
The waters outside her window are still rising. No one has ever seen or even heard of such rains and floods, not since Noah built his ark. In some sped-up version of history, geography, and architecture, Paris has turned into another city altogether, its roads transformed into canals, the canals filled with sewage and the wreckage of people’s lives.
All the buildings and monuments have turned into islands, the buildings disgorging whatever wasn’t fastened to their structures. It’s as if the body of Paris itself were afflicted with a flesh wound that refuses to heal.
When Olga wakes, Sonya feeds her as much soup as the child will take, which isn’t much. Squeezing her mother’s hands, Olga apologizes over and over again for having behaved so recklessly—and then murmurs that she only wants to sleep. Her skin, clammy and cold when she was first brought in from out of doors, is hot now. Her eyes, whenever she wakes, are dull and watery.
No one arrives to help them. Sonya wonders whether her note has even reached Paul. She thinks of the beautifully lettered sign he always kept posted on the door to the inner sanctum of his workshop: Attention! Danger! Before knocking, ask yourself three times if it is absolutely necessary to disturb HIM.
Like the other rich people of Paris, he no doubt fled the city weeks ago, when the rains first started. How stupid she’d been to expect Paul Poiret to help them. In the times before the flood, Sonya would have walked to the pharmacy for advice and medicine if one of them were ill. But everything has become nearly impossible now, for anyone without access to a boat or raft of some kind. They are trapped indoors, with only what they have already to sustain them—without any of the resources from the world outside they always took for granted, as a given. As a lifeline.
Olga’s cough and cold come on, in the middle of the night, some twelve hours after Sonya rescued her from the frigid, filthy waters.
On the second day, her coughing is accompanied by a wheeze, as if there were a small wounded animal trapped inside the prison of her ribcage. When her body isn’t wracked by coughing, she sleeps—deeply, noisily, with a watery sound bubbling up from deep inside her. The last time Sonya heard such water-logged, tortured breathing was in the days and hours before her father died.
She sits beside Olga, unwilling to let go of her hand, fighting the sense of hopelessness and grief that keeps welling up inside of her. Naomi confects a mustard plaster, following Sonya’s frantic instructions. On her own, Naomi brings them sugared cups of tea, which Sonya feeds to Olga one spoonful at a time till the child vomits. She complains of pain in her chest. Waking once, a terrified look in her eyes, she whispers something about flames getting closer. About their heat.
Sonya realizes that she has no idea about the fantasies that fill her daughter’s head. A better mother would have done a better job listening—understanding what Olga read, and what effect it had on her. A better, more insightful mother could have saved her child from the altogether impractical idealism that seemed to animate Olga’s thoughts and actions. That had propelled her toward this very disaster. What kind of mother sees what she wants to see, Sonya asks herself, instead of what is? What kind of mother fails to guide and cultivate her child’s genius, only wanting her to be, conveniently and comfortably, normal? Sonya understands that, once more—despite her every good intention—she’s failed to do right by those who love her.
She bargains with God to take her, instead of Olga. But if Sonya dies, who will watch over her daughters? Who will shepherd them safely into adulthood?
How can she have risked her own children’s lives like this, consigning them to poverty and privation, when they might have continued to live so comfortably in Saint Petersburg, with Daniel and his family, if Sonya hadn’t been so stubborn and selfish?
On the third day of Olga’s illness, Naomi appears beside the bed, dressed in her cloak and hat. “I will go find a doctor.”
“But in this flood, my child? I won’t have you risking your life as well.”
“The rain has stopped somewhat.” Naomi kisses her mother’s forehead. “I’ll be careful—I promise you.”
Sonya nods. She doesn’t think she’s slept at all, but then she thinks perhaps she did, a bit. And then, as if only just remembering her youngest child, she asks, “Where’s Baila?”
“She’s sleeping now. I gave her some soup and bread.”
“You’re a very good girl, Naomi.”
“I love you, Mama. I will return as soon as I can.”
When she gets up to help lower Naomi out the window, Sonya notices that her own clothes are drenched in sweat, whether hers or Olga’s, she isn’t sure.
She stays at the window until Naomi is swallowed up by the rainy landscape.
How hard it is to feel so helpless. Sonya envies the kangaroo, who can gather her babies back to her and keep them safe, even after they’re born. She doesn’t usually mind being both mother and father to her children—but she minds now. She lies down beside Olga again, folding her into her arms, holding her as close as she had before the child developed such strong ideas and sharp elbows. She drifts in and out of thinking she’s in Kishinev again, holding her dying mother while snow falls outside, blanketing everything in silence. And then Sonya remembers that it’s Olga she holds now, and it’s Olga’s labored breathing in her ears.
There has always been something otherworldly about this girl, who lives so much inside the books she reads—who seems so unconcerned about the small things that are of paramount importance to every other girl Sonya has ever known. Olga’s eyes, so much like Asher’s, seem to be looking past or through Sonya, into some middle distance that only she can see.
Olga’s breathing becomes more and more shallow. She stops squeezing back when Sonya squeezes her hand. She makes no sign that she hears her mother’s murmured words of love to her, pleading with her not to leave them.
Sonya wakes with a start. There’s a great banging on the door, which is still half submerged in the flood. It sounds as if the Devil himself has risen up from Hell to announce his arrival.
Baila runs to the window, looks out, and pushes it open, letting in a gust of wind and rain. “Here, messieurs!” she calls down in her surprisingly powerful voice to the boat tied up alongside the raised sidewalk outside their door. “You must climb up!”
“Who is it, child?”
“It is two gentlemen, Mama, one of them with flowers and a basket, and the other with a small black bag.”
“Where is Naomi?”
“She is there, too—in the boat.”A booming male voice shouts up from down below, “I have no less than Abel Desjardins with me!”
Sonya has heard of him, of course—the most famous and most expensive doctor in all of Paris. A feeling of hope surges through her. Grateful tears fill her eyes. It doesn’t even occur to her that Paul will be meeting Baila—and Baila will be meeting Paul—for the very first time.
Paris
1909
It seemed as if everyone in the Café de la Paix had fallen silent. Jeannette felt sure that everyone was staring at the two of them—dressed alike, looking just alike, and sitting as close together as a pair of lesbians. Jeannette thought she’d die of shame.
As soon as the wave of nausea passed, she pulled away from the doppelgänger who seemed determined to ruin her life, wriggling out of her suffocating embrace.
“And in the meantime,” Jeannette said, composing herself, “until you found me, you thought it would be a good idea to have a child by my lover.”
The words landed like a knife in Sonya’s chest. Of course, her twin would be the one person to see the truth she’d been so successful in hiding from everyone else.
It took her a moment to find the words to convey her complicated feelings. “It was the only way I had to feel close to you, until I found you.”
“To betray me? Is that some sort of Jewish logic? My God, you make me sick!”
Another body blow. Sonya paused, moistened her lips. Took another sip of her champagne. “I knew he was your lover because of the way he spoke to me, at the Gare du Nord, when I arrived in Paris for the first time. He mistook me for you. And then I saw him again, that same day, at Maison Worth.”
“In 1903. Yes, I know—he told me.”
“He told you?”
“Not then. Not until just the other day, when I came to him, dressed like you. I never want to see that man again.”
“Nor do I,” said Sonya. “For all these years, he kept your identity and whereabouts hidden from me, even though he knew full well that I lived in hope of finding you.”
“And so you became his lover.”
“He seduced me!”
Jeannette looked at her coldly. “Are you saying that he raped you?”
Sonya bowed her head, unsure what to say.
Why was there only one word for something so essentially overwhelming and confusing? Something that could happen so quickly. A gesture, a mood, that turned from one thing to something else entirely. Tenderness turning to insistence. The will of his body imposing itself on hers. His larger size and greater weight. The weight of his urgency and need. The training that all women have that becomes instinctual: to be pleasing. To be compliant. Her mind had simply shut off. Shut down, whispering, No, this isn’t happening—wait, it’s happened! And then there was no turning back.
She’d shed some tears afterwards but, truth be told, he hadn’t forced her. He hadn’t hurt her. On the contrary, she’d enjoyed the touch of his hands and the way he seemed to know exactly how to give her pleasure.
Years after the nightmare of Asher’s murder, years after Baila’s birth, Sonya kept returning to Paris—ostensibly to continue her search for Zaneta. But she knew that hadn’t been the sole reason. Numbed, she’d wanted to feel again—to feel herself as an attractive, sensuous woman. Yes, in a perverse sort of way, to feel closer to her twin—to know what she felt, and what it was like to be her, even if she was never allowed to know her. To experience that thing Paul Poiret had taught Sonya, which she could make happen by herself now. But it wasn’t ever the same as it was when it was caused by the feeling of his hands, his mouth, his passion pressing on her. Inside her. She’d gone into another world then, each time. She’d forgotten about Zaneta and even about her own children.
Paul Poiret was a sort of magician when it came to adorning and adoring women’s bodies. How could Sonya possibly explain all this to her sister? “It was an error in judgment,” she finally said, “allowing myself to become involved with him. Although I can’t regret it now. I can’t regret Baila, don’t you see?”
“I see a self-deluded slut, worse than all the sluts I’ve ever known, myself included. Because at least when a dancer has sex with a man she doesn’t love, she does it for reasons of survival. Whereas you—”
Jeannette paused mid-sentence, studying Sonya’s face. “How could you have done that to me, knowing what you did?”
Sonya shook her head. “You’re right—it was wrong of me. Not only because of you, but also because I was married, that first time.” She decided to hold nothing back. “There weren’t many times, Jeannette… I was trying to understand something. But, in the end, I realized how wrong it was—how wrong I was. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I doubt you were thinking at all. Men are not the only ones who are ruled by their passions. Did he rub your feet?”
It was harder, it would seem, to hide things from Jeannette than it was to hide things from herself. “I told myself that, eventually, I would find him out,” Sonya whispered, “and both you and I would get our revenge.”
“And meanwhile you enjoyed the pleasures of his company and the clothes he gave you. Did he take you to Meudon?”
Sonya felt the familiar feeling of shame washing over her. The guilt she’d felt throughout her childhood, whenever she’d thought about her poor dead twin. “You had schooled him well, Jeannette, in how to please us.”
