What Disappears, page 28
Women are desperately kissing their sweethearts and husbands goodbye. Cocottes turned patriots are handing out bacon sandwiches and red roses at booths set up by the Red Cross. Children, their innocent faces filled with hope and belief, are waving tri-color flags.
What will happen to the fathers and husbands? What will happen to Paris? Even now, the German army is surging through Belgium toward France. All the able-bodied men are leaving the capital. Nearly every single one of them has answered the call to mobilize. Only women, children, and men too old to help will be left in Paris, undefended, on their own.
Some of the soldiers look quite dazed. But others look exuberant, so proud in their new uniforms, oblivious to the implications of the mobilization. Have they thought about what this means for them—what it means for all of Europe? How the government has failed them in choosing war above diplomacy? How they are the playthings now of national pride?
The words of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès, that great and humanistic opponent of war, keep echoing in Olga’s head. How clearly and truthfully his words rang out when he spoke to the crowd, asking them to envision a world where the resources used to prepare for war were instead used to make a better life for all humankind.
Olga is still reeling from the news she heard this morning, at the offices of Le Matin. Jean Jaurès has been murdered, shot in the back by a French nationalist, through the window of the Café du Croissant, where he was meeting with his fellow socialists, tireless in their efforts to expose the French president’s secret alliance with Russia and his morally bankrupt rationale for going to war.
Could Jean Jaurès, if he had lived, have stopped this madness? Why do all these people look so excited and happy? Don’t they see, as Olga can see, the months and perhaps even years of suffering that lie ahead, the young men who will murder and be murdered, the mutilated bodies, the grief that always follows in the wake of war?
Olga is shoved up against the backpack of a Zouave in billowing red trousers. His face breaks into a smile when he looks down at her.
“Gaston!” she cries.
“Marmosets,” he croons softly. “Beautiful marmosets!” Olga’s eyes fill with tears. “You mustn’t cry, little one.”
“But, Gaston, it’s too horrible—war! And you in those bright red trousers. They might as well paint you with a bull’s eye.”
“Ah, but I am proud to serve with the Zouaves! And I am proud to serve France.”
Olga takes off her glasses and wipes her eyes. “It’s the sickness of imperialism, don’t you see?” She gestures at the crowd. “What if all this money and all these resources were spent instead on useful things—to increase the well-being of people, to build decent houses for workers, to grow more food so that no one must go hungry? War is wrong!”
Gaston kneels down in front of her, as he did that other time, so long ago now. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabs at her eyes. And then he hugs her.
It’s a long hug. Olga is sobbing now. She hates herself for being so emotional. She’s here to write a story for le Matin. Even the Baron de Jouvenel has gone off to fight the Germans, leaving a skeleton crew to publish the paper. Colette is being so stupid about it. Colette thinks the war is a big adventure.
Gaston holds her at arm’s length. “I must go now—I’ll lose my battalion,” he says. “Here, keep this.” He gives her the handkerchief.
“No,” she cries, “you’ll need it!”
“I insist. Keep it as a souvenir of me—of our friendship.”
Olga looks into Gaston’s lovely, long-lashed eyes. What fun they’d had that night, at Paul Poiret’s famous party! How all of that seems so long ago and like something from another world, a world that seemed as if it would last forever—but now it’s gone.
She’d wished ardently for time to pass, so that she could escape her childhood and everything that seemed so oppressive then. And yet she wishes now that she could have it back again. “I’m fourteen now, Gaston. I have never been kissed—and there is a war.”
He seems to consider this. And then he bends down and kisses her, chastely, on the lips. “There now. You’ve been kissed. And there will be many more kisses for you, Olga.” He stands up straight again, looking ahead of them through the crowd, finally spotting another Zouave. Over his shoulder, as he strides away, he calls, “You’ve become a beauty, you know.”
Part VII
Paris
1915
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.”
Part VIII
Buenos Aires
1929
The moment explodes with buttery yellow light: the sea! Waves are breaking gently on the shore—and sinking, hissing as they recede.
Sonya can smell salt spray, and hear and see the gulls, swirling and calling above her, bright white against the tender blue sky.
And there is Jascha, walking beside her, barefoot, his trousers rolled up to just below his knees. He’s holding her hand. 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. Jascha’s grandchildren, so dear to her, are cavorting on the sand ahead of them.
And yet the pain of all she’s lost never goes away.
Everything disappears—everything we love and everything we long for. What remains is something Sonya has a hard time putting into words. It has to do, she now knows, with holding her loved ones close, even if they’re far away. Even if they’re no longer alive.
The light is so bright that everything she sees is ringed in gold.
Glossary
anti-Dreyfusard
For over a decade, from 1894 to 1906, France was bitterly divided over the case of a French artillery officer of Jewish descent, Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of espionage. The famous “Dreyfus affair” divided France into pro-republican, anticlerical Dreyfusards and pro-Army, mostly Catholic, anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfusards.
arabesque allongé
Pose in which one leg is extended behind the body, forming a right angle with the back, while the dancer’s supporting leg is straight and both arms are fully extended.
balletomane
a ballet enthusiast who attends as many performances as possible
cocotte
a slang term in French for a less-than-respectable woman; a tart or a trollop
femme de ménage
cleaning lady
Gospodin
In Russian, a term of address for a man
le goûter
The equivalent of “high tea” but with sweet food only, such as bread and chocolate—a 4:30 tradition for children in France, where families usually don’t sit down for supper until late in the evening
haute laine
deep-pile (wool)
jambon beurre
a ham and cheese sandwich on a buttered baguette
l’eau mineral
mineral water
Mâitre
In French, designates that the person being addressed or referred to is a lawyer
“Monsieur, s’il vous plaît!”
“Sir, if you please!”
“Enchanté!”
French for “A pleasure to make your acquaintance!”—literally, “Enchanted!”
en plein air
out of doors, in the fresh air; outside
entrechat quatre
a spectacular jump in ballet, beginning in fifth position, during which the dancer rapidly crosses and re-crosses her straight legs at the lower calf while suspended mid-air
Époisses
a pungent soft-paste cows-milk cheese made in the Côte-d’Or region of France
Ja estoy estudiando
In Spanish, “I’m already studying.”
le Tout-Paris
everyone, most especially everyone who matters, in Paris
mayn klug froy
In Yiddish, “my clever wife”
origine du monde
“L’Origine du monde” (“The Origin of the World”), painted in 1866 in oil on canvas by the French artist Gustave Courbet, depicts a close-up view of a woman’s genitals.
ma puce
In French, “my flea” (an endearment)
“parade”
The term commonly used for the in-house launch of the new season’s fashion line at a maison de couture: the promenade of models wearing the season’s designs
en pointe
dancing in toe-shoes, which requires putting the entire weight of the body on the tips of the ballerina’s toes
petite amie
(romantic) girlfriend
midinettes
the girls or women who work in Parisian clothing stores
podstakannik
in Russian, a decorative metal holder with a handle, which encases a drinking glass for hot tea
rat or rats
the same literal meaning in French as in English, used as a slang term for the lowest ranks of company dancers
regisseur
in classical ballet, a title for the person who restages or rehearses a ballet company and/or manages the rehearsals
Saison Russe
Russian Season: refers to the year 1909 in Paris, when Sergei Diaghilev’s nascent ballet company staged their first performances
Acknowledgments
This novel took a very long time to be born, and benefited from the encouragement of many readers, starting with Linda Asher at the New Yorker, who read it in its earliest incarnation as my pre-first novel, which I wrote as a twenty-one-year-old in an isolated hilltop cottage (lent to me by Louisa Putnam) in West County Cork, Ireland.
Decades later, after my first two novels had been published, I returned to the material, inspired in part by the magnificent first-edition books about the Ballets Russes in the private library of Dr. Adela Spindler Roatcap of the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco. Professor Roatcap, who had sought me out as a speaker, was as generous with her expertise as she was with her books.
The archivists of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library let me pore over rare photographs that provided a key to understanding the young Nijinsky in his earliest days with Diaghilev and see through the glamor to the vulnerability, unbounded ambition, and courage of all those artists who came together to create the Ballets Russes.
My dear friend, the late Marcus Grant, read several drafts of What Disappears. His comments were always both perspicacious and helpful. I shall always feel a debt of gratitude, both for his literary acumen and his mordant sense of humor.
When my novel had already entered the production pipeline at Regal House, Gavin Larsen’s newly published memoir, Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life—and Gavin herself—provided validation for the truths I endeavored to find. In the case of one particular step in the ballet vocabulary I’d described inaccurately, she broke the movement down for me and provided new language to help me get it right.
Pianist and conductor Allan Dameron lent his invaluable insider’s knowledge for the chapter describing the debut of The Rite of Spring under the baton of Maestro Pierre Monteux.
Many of my friends gave me encouragement as well as the benefit of their experience. Laura Schulkind’s tender poem about her mother, “Her Porcelain Skin,” informed my description of Sonya’s deathbed vigil. What Disappears is the second novel for which I owe a debt of appreciation to the marvelous San Francisco Symphony violinist and native Russian speaker, Polina Sedukh. Arline Wyler has been, through the years, a generous and gracious reader of both published and unpublished works of mine—and uncomplainingly read several drafts of this novel. Liz and Jeff Stonehill will always occupy that special place in my heart reserved for friends who are also canny and insightful readers.
My dedication of this novel to Grace Cavalieri, Poet Laureate of Maryland and a champion such as I’ve never had before, will, I hope, trumpet my sense of gratitude.
Regal House Publishing was a small independent press when I signed a contract with them in 2020. Thanks to the boundless energy, vision, and enthusiasm of the entire crew there, but especially the founding editor Jaynie Royal and her delightful colleague Pam Van Dyk, the house has grown up to become a thriving literary community in a shrinking landscape of commercial literary publishers.
Finally, I wish to thank my husband Wayne Roden for making it possible for me, these past twelve years, to abandon myself to my writing.
Barbara Quick, What Disappears
