What Disappears, page 6
Sighing again, but with a different feeling, she bent down to help him. There was a momentary frisson of the type she’d hoped for when, briefly, he held her stockinged foot in his hands. “That feels so good,” she said.
“Ah, but this will feel even better!”
He lifted her into the bed and rolled over on top of her.
What she felt, she knew—she could tell—wasn’t anything like what he was feeling. He groaned and sighed as if he’d just seen the face of God.
“Oy, Sonya! How did I get so lucky?”
She stroked his cheek, which needed a shave. There was something, she decided, wrong with her. Asher was a wonder of a husband, always kind and good to her. He recognized the business as hers, and allowed her to make all the major decisions pertaining to it. An excellent tailor himself, he did everything he could to contribute to their success. He didn’t drink or go with other women. He was always gentle with their children.
There was something, Sonya decided, that was missing in her, or that had somehow gone wrong. She should never have allowed Jascha to kiss her! She would never know that feeling again—and it would always remain a girlish, unfulfilled longing that had nothing to do with marriage and mature love. Part of her was, and would always be, caught there, under that streetlamp, in the light-filled, falling snow.
Asher sat up, seeming as if he’d just been filled with air. “You will go—you and the girls!”
“Don’t be silly, darling. It wouldn’t do. And, anyway, what would I wear?”
“And this from the best dressmaker in Kishinev! What would you wear? Make something new! Something extravagantly beautiful. As beautiful as you are.”
She was about to argue with him—and then stopped herself.
Why not go? Such an opportunity might not arise again. She might even be able to justify it, professionally. She thought of all the ladies she would see at the party, in all their finery. “I could make sketches of the clothes there. We might even expand our line, you know, to make our ladies more fashionable. More in keeping with trends in the capital.”
“Another one of your excellent ideas, mayn klug froy!”
Sonya felt very grateful for Asher in that moment—there were precious few husbands, from what she’d heard from friends, who would be so generous and kind. She kissed him tenderly, looking at him with love.
She did love him. Those other feelings might well come, in time, as well as the courage to confide in Asher, even to guide his hands—to slow him down.
Looking in the mirror, pinning up her hair again, Sonya felt certain that they would be able to talk about those things that were so very private and yet so important to a husband and wife. She peeked over her shoulder to smile at him. “I should write to Daniel and Klara—send another letter, right away.”
“I’ll go wake the girls,” said Asher. Enfolding her in his arms again, he added, “How did I ever get so lucky?”
Asher helped Sonya, with Olga and a hatbox in her arms, onto the train—then hopped down and handed up Naomi. Then down and up again to carry their suitcases to their compartment and get them settled into their seats. He tucked a blanket around Naomi, who, fighting back tears, was holding tight to her favorite doll. Addressing himself to the doll, Asher admonished her to be good, eliciting a reluctant smile from his first-born.
Both girls adored their papa. Naomi always wanted to show her drawings to Asher first, delighting in his affection and praise. And lately, whenever he read in little Olga’s presence, she would crawl up into his lap and look at the pages with such focused attention that Sonya joked the baby was teaching herself to read. Once, Sonya found Olga with Asher’s specs perched crookedly on her face while she stared at the front page of the newspaper. “It’s not the glasses that confer the power, little one,” Sonya told her. When she took the glasses away, Olga began to wail.
The whistle blew and the conductor intoned his announcement that the train was about to depart. Asher’s eyes filled with tears, and both girls started crying, when he kissed all three of them goodbye.
Sonya, for her part, felt only a guilty sense of excitement.
When the train pulled into the Vitebsky station, there was Daniel waiting on the platform with Klara, their three children, and a darling old nanny in tow.
For Sonya, it seemed like a fairytale from the moment she stepped out into that palace of art nouveau décor, into a palette of colors she’d never seen. She was momentarily speechless, gazing up and around at the whimsical archways, the stained-glass paintings, and the vast cupola that rose far above their heads.
Daniel managed everything—enlisting a porter, giving instructions about their luggage, making sure they’d left nothing behind. Klara was all warmth and kindness. The nanny opened her arms to little Olga and took Naomi’s hand as Daniel led the way to an elegant café, right there in the station.
Daniel procured what seemed the best table in the place, with its own chandelier. Plates of food began arriving, deep-red bowls of borscht and platters heaped with fragrant, thick hunks of rye bread.
“So many pieces of color!” said Naomi, looking with wonder at all the stained glass surrounding them.
“Oh, an artist!” said Daniel, giving Sonya a look of approval. “The architect responsible for all this magnificence is one of our boys, I want you to know.” It clearly filled him with pleasure to introduce the wonders of Saint Petersburg to his sister. “Sima Minash—although you can bet he had the devil of a time getting his licensure.”
Everyone talked at once. All of them laughed.
Klara had brought a heavy fur coat and hat for Sonya, and miniature versions of each for Naomi and baby Olga—relics, Klara explained, from her own children’s past, which she’d been saving for just such an occasion. After their meal, they all bundled into a carriage waiting for them on a wide and gracious avenue, next to what Daniel identified as the Vvedensky Canal, where the fat globes of the street lamps glowed in perfect orange reflections on the ice.
The cold made their winter in Kishinev seem mild by comparison. But they rode nearly as comfortably as if they’d been indoors. Sonya gazed out the carriage windows at the silvered branches of trees that lined the roads, the gigantic glittering icicles and, all around them, the parti-colored and gilded domes of what seemed an endless array of fanciful cathedrals.
Daniel’s girls insisted on the zoological gardens for their first stop. Naomi and Olga were enchanted by the bears, lions, tigers, and an ancient elephant that turned a hand organ with its trunk while beating a drum and cymbals with its foot. Daniel threw copper kopeks through the bars of its enclosure, and the children squealed with delight when the elephant retrieved the coins with its trunk, passing them to its keeper.
Over the next few days, they saw palaces and parks, galleries of western and Russian paintings, and a mind-numbing display of gold and gems that served no purpose beyond attesting to their owners’ wealth. There were rooms filled with jewel-encrusted tableware and jewelry made of diamonds as big as hailstones.
Sonya felt how she, her children, and even Daniel’s very grand family were dwarfed, standing before Mikhailovsky Castle, below the equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The statue seemed to embody the endless, unstoppable power of the Russian tsars. In one palace, now a shrine, they saw a life-size wax figure of Tsar Alexander II, wearing the clothes he’d been wearing when he was killed, in 1881, by a bomb detonated on the streets of Saint Petersburg by Narodnaya volya, one year after Sonya and Zaneta were born.
As Sonya stood transfixed before the wax simulacrum, she wondered who had been tailor to this tsar. The clothes looked as if they’d been made somewhere in the West—and perhaps, she reasoned, no Russian would be trusted to hover with shears around the person of any member of the emperor’s family. The statue, with its bulbous eyes and mutton-chop whiskers executed in such detail, seemed almost alive.
The message conveyed by this statue, and all the others, was that the tsar was indeed immortal, no matter how many bombs might be exploded in his path or bullets fired into his body. Kill one tsar and another one will rise up, as if by divine intervention, to step into his place.
Daniel was vocal in his belief that change was coming to Russia. But Sonya, without ever saying so, believed that her brother was, like their father had been, a hopeless dreamer.
More pleasing than any of the monuments for Sonya was the chance to attend the Imperial Ballet.
Daniel had begun to serve as an occasional legal advisor to the up-and-coming ballerina, Anna Pavlova, who paid her legal fees, for the most part, with complimentary tickets. There were only ever two tickets at a time, so Klara stayed home with the children while Sonya accompanied her brother to the Mariinsky Theater, where they would see Pavlova perform in Giselle. “She’s also one of ours,” he whispered when they had settled themselves in their seats and the lights were lowered.
“Pavlova?”
“It’s not generally known—and if it were, it would certainly jeopardize her career. Everyone knows she’s the illegitimate daughter of a washerwoman. But what they don’t know is that her father was a Jewish banker named Poliakoff.”
“How much you know, Daniel!” Sonya hoped she never had a secret she needed to keep from her brother.
The house lights dimmed, the orchestra began to play, and the curtain rose. Sonya forgot about everything else, in thrall to the spell cast over her by the dancers, the sets, the costumes, the music, and something else she could only describe to herself as magic.
At the party afterwards, Sonya felt more attractive than she’d ever felt in her lifetime. She saw several women with lorgnettes—and quite a few of the gentlemen—look admiringly at the dress she designed and made for the occasion.
“Let them wonder where you bought it!” Daniel whispered to her as he passed by with Klara on his arm.
Sonya didn’t dance—neither she nor Daniel thought it would be proper. And she was grateful, really, because she’d never learned to dance. But it delighted her to watch the beautifully dressed couples swirling around the room in each other’s arms. It was flattering to be asked to dance, several times, by gentlemen who didn’t know or didn’t care that she was Daniel’s married sister.
Daniel’s great surprise for Sonya and all his guests—and even Klara—was that Pavlova had agreed to come to the party and perform her famous solo from the third act of La Bayadère—“as a trade,” Daniel explained in an aside to his sister, “because she spent all her savings on a three-month-long trip to Milan to study with a famous old ballet teacher at La Scala.”
It was a revelation for Sonya to witness Pavlova’s art at such close range, close enough to feel her own life, and time itself, obliterated by the ballerina’s embodiment of the spirit of the murdered temple dancer, Nikiya.
The emotion evoked by the ballerina—wordlessly and yet without mime—seemed like nothing less than a miracle. Sonya found herself in tears at the end, and realized that she’d been transported somewhere completely outside herself. Outside of time. It was, she thought with some amusement, a feeling she knew she’d never be comfortable trying to convey to someone else, very much like the feeling she’d had from Jascha’s kiss.
After Pavlova had changed out of her costume and held court for a while, surrounded by admirers, drinking champagne, Daniel brought his sister over to meet his guest of honor. Pavlova at first gave Sonya a perfunctory smile, but then looked at her with interest when Daniel mentioned that her tailoring shop, in the region where they came from, was widely known and widely lauded for the beauty and originality of her designs.
“Is that so?” Pavlova said. “Which of the Parisian couturiers do you prefer?”
“My sister hasn’t been to Paris yet, Anna Matveyevna. But she’s going soon.”
Sonya had always believed in her brother’s truthfulness. She blinked now, wondering whether this was some act of bravado—or a lawyer’s machinations. She said nothing, waiting for him to say more.
But it was Pavlova who spoke first. “How very convenient!” She lowered her voice. “Kschessinska, that bitch, has eclipsed us at all the parties since she sent her dressmaker to Paris.” She took both of Sonya’s hands in hers. “When you go this season, you must watch the parades for me in the great fashion houses on rue de la Paix! Chez Paquin, chez Doucet. Madame Louise Chéruit… And there’s another, I’ve heard, a newcomer who is creating a great stir at the House of Worth, scandalizing everyone.”
“People in Paris have the leisure to be scandalized by clothing?” Daniel looked amused.
“Why, he practically gave apoplexy to our dear old fat Princess Bariatinsky with a coat he designed for her. She suggested that Monsieur Worth have him shot—but then all the ladies of Paris clamored for the same model. I don’t recall his name. Paul something.”
“How very convenient, indeed,” said Daniel. “Sonya will survey all the latest designs—and confect a brilliant new dress for you on her return.”
When Sonya just stood there, too surprised to say anything, Daniel touched the small of her back—and she bowed.
“I remember now: Paul Poiret!” said the dancer, glowing with happiness. “Oh, just wait till Kschessinska sees me at the next Winter Palace ball!”
In a bit of a panic, Sonya was about to explain that her brother was mistaken—she had no travel plans. But Pavlova had turned away from her, focusing her attention once again on Daniel. “You’re worth your weight in gold, you know.”
“I try to give good value.”
He and Pavlova shared a look that made Sonya wonder if he might be something more than a lawyer to the ballerina.
Later, as she lay in bed, she remembered that look—and thought about how impossible it was for anyone to understand anyone else’s marriage. All the nuances, complexities, and small disappointments contained in that space that could never be seen, not really, by anyone from the outside. She so liked Klara, and hoped that her brother loved her as well as he seemed to.
She thought about the casual lie he’d told to Anna Pavlova about Sonya’s travel plans—and pondered whether people in Daniel’s circle actually took such journeys, on the spur of the moment, as a matter of routine. Paris! In her mind, she saw it as a city entirely dedicated to haute couture, with dress and millinery shops everywhere and a populace of exquisitely attired men, women, and children.
Drifting off to sleep at last, Sonya resolved to confront her brother in the morning about that completely irresponsible promise he’d made on her behalf.
She found her brother in his library, poring over a huge book with very small print, working just as hard as if the gala of the night before hadn’t ever happened.
He looked up at her. “I’m so glad you decided to come to our party! It was worth the journey, wasn’t it?”
“Beyond my wildest expectations.” She sat herself down in one of the room’s comfortable leather chairs. “But what was that all about, that lie you told to Anna Pavlova? It’s unkind of you to tease me.”
“Tease you? I wasn’t teasing you.” Daniel took off his glasses, leaning forward on his elbows. “I know you’ve longed to go to Paris, ever since that day you learned the truth about Zaneta.”
Sonya stared at him. “You meant what you said?”
“Of course, I did. Your husband can manage things for a few days, can’t he, without you?”
“But, Daniel—” Sonya did a quick calculation. “The season there is about to start!”
Paris
1909
Taking the final steps two at a time, breathing hard by the time she reaches the doorway, Jeannette bursts into the attic dressing-room with its rows of mirrors and l’oeil de boeuf windows, the slanting late-afternoon sunlight thick with rice powder. Every surface is littered with discarded makeup brushes, powder puffs and broken kohl pencils, pots of jewel-colored eye shadow and rouge, unattached wings, wreaths with missing flowers, and a garment rack crammed with tulle skirts that stir when she opens the door, as if filled with invisible dancers. The floor is an obstacle course of ruined tights and worn-out toe-shoes, feathers and parts of costumes gone astray, and twenty or so ballerinas—some with patrons, some without—every one of them, it has seemed of late, younger than Jeannette.
One of her old colleagues from the Opera Ballet glances up at her, away from the mirror. “Still in your street clothes? You’re going to get another fine.”
Cold, even though the room is steaming, Jeannette feels as if she’s moving underwater. She thinks again about the cousins she knew in childhood—how different all of them were from her and yet so like one another in the way they looked and even what they cared about.
The bells chime again: fifteen minutes till they need to be on stage, each dancer in place, every part of her posed, poised and ready for the moment when the curtain rises.
Working with suddenly clumsy hands, she strips off her clothes, down to her corset—and turns her back to her friend with a wordless appeal to be unlaced. Her forest fairy costume is where she left it when the Russian maid interrupted Jeannette’s preparations, filling her with such a glorious and stupid sense of hope that her life was about to change.
While she’s putting on her makeup, it seems as if she’s seeing two faces, one superimposed upon the other: her own, and that of the Russian seamstress. “It’s mine!” she says inside herself, wishing she could make that thief of faces simply disappear. An image of the pretty little girl in Pavlova’s dressing room flashes in her mind again. She wonders how it would feel to be loved by such a child. To be the center of the world for such a child.
After rouging her lips, she sucks on her index finger to imprint the excess color there instead of on her teeth—then wipes her finger off with a rag.
