What Disappears, page 5
Sonya had been marking time only in terms of how much time had passed since Jascha’s letter, and how much time remained until his sister’s wedding. But now she made herself think about the calendar as it pertained to Kishinev. There were only two weeks left before the start of the school term, when all the children’s new uniforms would be needed.
She said nothing more, out of respect for the dead.
But Masha, her eyes sparkling, could read the question in Sonya’s eyes. “I’ve already recommended your shop to the Reverend Father. Go home, my old friend, and gather whatever help you’ll need to get this done!”
With her mother’s blessing, Sonya negotiated a good price on the fabric—and found two skilled seamstresses willing to defer their wages on the promise of being paid double the going rate.
The work was hard and there were never enough hours of daylight. Sonya swore that as soon as they were paid, she would make the investment to have gas lighting installed. In the meantime, she kept so many candles burning, and the air of the workshop grew so warm, that the three of them stripped down to their chemises, as if they were working in a factory somewhere in the tropics.
After snuffing out all the candles in the shop, cleaning up and eating whatever Faya had prepared for supper, Sonya took turns with her sister, sitting at their mother’s bedside until the medicine worked and Nadia fell asleep.
Once the hats and coats for the parochial school were all delivered and paid for, a change was brought about for Nadia Luria and her daughters. Sonya was able to write to Daniel that he needn’t send them money anymore.
Faya, happy to leave the business of the shop to Sonya, found a math tutor for herself and continued her studies. The little sister had become the stand-in for their mother, the person charged with keeping all of them safe.
It hadn’t at all been what Sonya had wanted or imagined for her life—but she couldn’t fail to see that this was her life now. All her fondest dreams had disappeared as stealthily as frost flowers on a windowpane.
She tried to remain alert, even though she was sometimes weary as she sat—sometimes late into the night—at her mother’s bedside. When Nadia couldn’t sleep, Sonya read to her or brushed her hair, which was so thin now, so different from the way it had been, full and glossy, before she’d become so ill.
When Nadia’s eyes grew heavy, Sonya eased her down on to the pillow. If her mother clung to her, Sonya slipped under the covers and held her close, matching her breathing breath for breath. She thought about how her mother had held her close and been there for her throughout her life, from the very start. Why was it then that Sonya felt, in some deep part of herself, unlovable and bad?
The bell was tolling in the square when Sonya awoke too late to tell the hour. It was still night. Her mother’s eyes were staring. Her lips were pale.
Sonya leapt out of the bed, terrified that death had come in the night, while she slept by her mother’s side. But then Nadia blinked her eyes, and Sonya closed hers in a silent prayer of thanks. She dipped a clean cloth in the water jug, then moistened her mother’s once rosy lips, now caked with white. When Sonya proffered a glass of water, Nadia shook her head—and then clutched at her daughter’s hand.
“Something…confess to you,” she murmured.
Sonya bent closer to hear her. There was no noise in the room but the shifting of the embers in the stove. Moonlight poured through the window, bathing them in its quicksilver glow.
Nadia’s brow was furrowed and her lips kept pressing together then opening as if she were going to speak. Sonya tried to imagine what her mother, so brave and kind and good, might possibly want to confess.
And then she spoke, with more clarity than she had in weeks, without coughing. She held Sonya’s eyes in her gaze as she said, “Both of you lived.”
It was as if Nadia had saved her strength, over days and weeks, to say these words.
Sonya was fully awake now, every part of her listening.
“Zaneta almost died, but you saved her.” Nadia’s dark brown eyes grew wide. “A newborn, no bigger than a rabbit! You put your little arm around her—and brought her back to life again.”
Sonya required a long moment to take this in. And then a feeling of relief started flowing through her—like an elixir, soothing the hurt she’d always felt inside. The aching, vague, formless sense of it having been her fault somehow, that she alone had survived the passage into life begun by the two of them.
Letting go of her mother’s hand, Sonya looked at her as if at someone she didn’t know—had maybe never known. She’d never doubted her mother’s truthfulness before. How could she have neglected to tell this part of Sonya’s story—to give her this gift that now gave her such comfort?
“But how did she die then?” Sonya paused a moment. “How long did my twin sister live?”
A fit of coughing kept Nadia from saying more for several agonizing minutes. When she finally spoke, it was in the faintest whisper. “Daniel will tell you,” she said, “after I die.”
Faya had to rush out to send a wire to Daniel, and another to Lev—and bring the message of Nadia’s death to the rabbi.
“Courage!” Faya told her sister with a hug. “It won’t be long before the people from the burial society get here.” The little bell on the door tinkled as it closed behind her—and Sonya was left alone to keep watch over her mother’s corpse.
Frightened, still disbelieving, she sat beside the bed.
Creases and furrows had marked Nadia’s face during her last, long illness. But it was as if death had erased them. Dreading this moment for days now, for weeks, Sonya had been unprepared for the reappearance of her mother’s extraordinary beauty.
First wiping away her tears, Sonya planted two kisses on Nadia’s forehead, which was still warm and as smooth as marble now—one kiss for herself and another for Daniel, who had always been their mother’s favorite. Who probably wouldn’t be able to get there on time from Saint Petersburg within the twenty-four hours prescribed by tradition as the longest time they could wait before consigning their mother’s body to her grave.
Sonya stroked a lock of hair away from Nadia’s face, touched the waxen skin of her cheek, and then reached up and touched the skin of her own cheek, and felt the life inside. How was it that she was still alive? Smooth as silk, Jascha had said.
She was an orphan now, and her girlhood was over. The future stretched out before her like an unlit passageway.
Sonya and Faya had little in the way of comfort to offer one another. Their mother was what they had had in common. Who would each of them be without her gaze? What would connect them, one to the other?
Both sisters mourned, side by side and yet alone in their sorrow. It wasn’t until Daniel walked in—their distinguished and accomplished brother in his beautifully tailored suit, sporting a torn black ribbon in tribute to the deceased—that Sonya felt the rekindling of curiosity inside her about her mother’s last words.
“My dears!” said Daniel. “I took the first train.”
They gave him tea. They reminisced about their mother’s goodness and kindness, about all the ways in which she’d always been there for them.
Sonya wondered at her brother’s poise in this painful situation—but then, she thought, it was part of his professional training to maintain a studied demeanor. She suddenly felt self-conscious about her tearstained cheeks and uncombed hair. Although they weren’t observant, she and Faya knew enough about Jewish tradition to follow some of the rules surrounding death. They’d covered all the mirrors and sat on low benches. Sonya wondered if she looked just as awful as her sister.
“I must speak to you, Daniel!” she blurted out. Looking at Faya, she added, “Alone?”
“Faya, my dear,” said Daniel. “Go rest! You look so tired.”
“Even in this time of grief,” said Faya, “I am dispensable. Very well, then. Let the important members of this family have their say!”
Sonya tried to give Faya a kiss. But Faya pushed her away before sweeping off to their mother’s bedroom, where she was choosing to sleep now.
“Well then,” said Daniel, lighting a lamp. He took Sonya’s hands. “Pretty Sonya! We will find a husband for you.”
“A husband?” Sonya looked at her brother with disbelief. “Did you think I wanted to speak to you about a husband?”
“What else, then?”
What else then! Daniel always spoke to her with a touch of irony, as if Sonya couldn’t possibly know anything that Daniel didn’t know already. She looked him straight in the eyes. “Mother confided something to me, shortly before she died. Something that—astounded me.”
She had Daniel’s full attention now. He fidgeted in his chair.
Sonya spoke in a low voice, so that Faya wouldn’t overhear them. “Mother told me that Zaneta didn’t die on the day both of us were born. She said you knew the truth—and that you would tell me.”
Daniel knew as well as anyone that people said all sorts of things on their deathbeds, without consideration for the consequences to the living. He couldn’t tell, just by looking at her, how much Sonya knew, or how much their mother might have divulged. Intercepting those letters from the pharmacist’s son had been Nadia’s own decision. Destroying them had been Daniel’s. They had, between them, mother and son, agreed that it was for Sonya’s own good.
Daniel kept his face neutral, giving nothing away.
What a travesty it would have been for their family to allow the prettiest and most capable daughter to leave them, to travel to a part of the world so far away from Russia—from civilization itself—that her own mother would never see her again!
He paused a moment to find the right language to use, and the right way to say what he needed to say without saying too much.
“I was determined to tell you the truth myself, if Mother didn’t.”
Sonya was sorry now that she’d asked. The look on Daniel’s face disturbed her. “What truth?” she said.
Her brother looked like the lawyer he was, about to present his client’s case before a tribunal. “Father was arrested on the day you and Zaneta were born. By the time Mother had paid for his legal defense, there was no money left. Lev was bound as an apprentice, and Faya was sent to the countryside to work as a maid. They worked her unconscionably.”
Sonya looked at him with impatience. “I know all that!”
Daniel paused long enough to let her know he was displeased at the interruption. “Out of funds, out of food, and probably half out of her mind, Mother took you and Zaneta to the Jewish orphanage at the edge of town.”
Sonya could hardly believe her ears. “The orphanage?”
“It was meant to be a temporary measure, but while you were there, Zaneta was accidentally given away to a French couple who’d come to adopt a baby girl.”
It took Sonya a few ragged heartbeats to find her voice. It hurt to breathe. An orphanage! Why had she and Zaneta been taken there, while Daniel stayed at home?
She also felt something stirring inside her, a memory, although it was all sensation—wordless and confused. “Didn’t Mother search for her? Did you search for our sister after you were grown up?”
“Of course we made inquiries everywhere. But the couple who took her left a false name and address.”
“But did you find nothing? No trace of her?”
“Nothing, Sonya. We found nothing. The world is a very large place.”
“But, surely, Daniel—”
“Try to think about it logically, if you can. How could one find a girl who was brought to France as an infant, whose name was undoubtedly changed, and whose adoptive parents left no trace of their transaction?”
“But there must be some way of finding her!”
“I’m afraid there isn’t.”
Sonya stared into space across the chasm of time, envisioning possibilities that no one else would be capable of seeing. As if she were imbued with special powers. And then she turned her gaze on her brother, scrutinizing his face. “Do you know—did she and I, as infants, look alike? I know that some twins do and others don’t.”
“You were, from what Mother said, and from what I can remember, nearly indistinguishable. Of course, she and I could tell the difference.”
For the first time since Daniel’s arrival—for the first time since her mother’s death—Sonya smiled.
Daniel knew that he would have no trouble finding a match for Sonya. She was, quite aside from her good looks, an excellent businesswoman. Despite their mother’s long illness, Sonya had managed to keep the shop running, hiring more workers and winning an important new commission from the parochial school.
Daniel congratulated himself—and the blessed memory of his mother, too—that they hadn’t let Sonya run off to Argentina to live God knows what kind of life in the wilderness there. Well brought up, well protected, his little sister showed every promise of leading a life that was upright and good, a credit to their family. By any prospective mother-in-law’s calculations, Sonya was a catch.
“I will find our Zaneta!” she said with all the optimism of someone who has yet to learn life’s harshest lessons.
Taking his sister’s hand in his, Daniel spoke to her as if speaking to a child. “I had a colleague in Paris hunt for her. He’s very good, I can assure you.” He tried to hold Sonya’s gaze but she was looking off into the middle distance, her eyes shining. “The people, whoever they were, left no trail. Who knows whether they even lived in Paris? They might have come from anywhere in France—or even from one of the colonies.”
Turning back to him, Sonya seemed about to burst with happiness. “But I have what no one else has, as a lure to anyone who knows her.” She straightened her shoulders. “If we looked just alike as infants, we will look just alike now! I swear to you, Daniel—I will find Zaneta!”
How foolish women were, even the most competent of them, with all their romantic dreams! Daniel patted her hand. “Of course you will, Sonya. But first we must find you a husband. You, and Faya too.”
Kishinev to Saint Petersburg
1902
When Daniel was finally admitted to the bar, he and his wife Klara planned a big party, which Daniel especially urged Sonya to attend.
She could read between the lines of the letter he wrote to her. This party marked his entry into a new social stratum and a new life. He wanted Sonya to be there, but not their sister, even though he didn’t say so explicitly. Far away in Kiev, at thirty-three, Faya had just given birth to her first child, a little boy. Daniel speculated that Faya wasn’t likely to want to travel yet. He was similarly tepid in extending an invitation to Sonya’s husband, Asher. Daniel considered him to be a wonderful fellow, and Asher had proven himself to be a worthy and reliable match for Sonya. But he was, in Daniel’s estimation, a bit unpolished for the crowd of jurists and their wealthy clients he was gathering for his celebration—whereas Sonya, with her extraordinary beauty, would only enhance his status among them. His children, Daniel wrote, begged him to ask Sonya to bring her daughters with her—their cousins couldn’t wait to show them Saint Petersburg.
Sonya knew she couldn’t go to the capital without her husband—by all the rules of propriety she’d ever learned, it wouldn’t be right. Sending her regrets to her brother and sister-in-law, thanking them for their kind invitation, she explained that she had scads of orders to fill for the Christmas season, and would be faced, as usual, with a shortage of help over the holidays.
Nonetheless, Asher found her sitting in their bedroom, one afternoon soon after she mailed her letter, staring out the window and sighing as the exiting sun stained the winter sky in shades of magenta and pale yellow.
“You want to go to your brother’s groys partey, don’t you?” Asher put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. She reached across her chest to put her hand on his.
“Of course, I do. I know it’s selfish of me, and wrong.” She sighed again, very softly. “My life is here, with you and our girls.”
Sitting down beside her, Asher turned her around to face him. “You were barely more than a girl yourself, when I met you, when I saw your beautiful face for the first time. And, oy veh ist mir, you were faced with this mug of mine for the first time.”
Sonya loved how Asher could always make her smile. She looked with tenderness into his eyes, which seemed deeper and darker without his glasses. She touched his strong jaw and thought with a maternal sort of pang about whatever blow it was that had broken his nose before they met. For a boxer, Asher was an exceedingly gentle man, tender with Sonya and brimming over with affection for their children. Sonya knew that he would do anything to promote their happiness and protect them.
She leaned into him and he folded his arms around her.
“Do you think there’s time,” he whispered, “before the children wake up from their nap?”
She pushed away so that she could look into his eyes again. Perhaps the time had come, she thought, when the feelings she was meant to have as a wife would finally come to her—would flood her, as they had so long ago, under that streetlamp in the snow.
She nodded—then closed her eyes, parting her lips slightly. She wanted to hear that orchestra again—to feel her body awash in sensation. To feel ready on every inch of her skin for his touch. For his hands.
“Well, then!” He leapt up with that athletic grace he had, closed their bedroom door and unbuttoned his trousers, all in one movement before giving her a wet kiss on the mouth and then applying himself to unbuttoning her shoes. “How do you manage these, every day?”
