What Disappears: A Study in Lost Time

 

What Disappears, an historical novel by Barbara Quick, is an ambitious work populated with such larger-than-life personalities as the prima Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, the superhuman Polish ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky, the groundbreaking choreographer Sergei Diaghelev, the innovative French fashion designer Paul Poiret who released women from corsets but then put them in his hobble skirts. The Dresser will pause this list for now and say that writer Quick with these characters alone and the events  around them has seeded her novel for a spectacular cinematic rendering.

 

The heart of What Disappears is the quest of a Jewish Russian born and bred young seamstress named Sonya to find her identical twin. This non-linear novel opens in 1909 in Paris backstage in the heady rush to get Pavlova on stage with Nijinsky for a performance of the Ballets Russes, but this “young savage,” as Pavlova refers to Nijinsky, has accidentally during a morning practice ripped the bodice of her costume with a ring gifted to him by Diaghelev. She screams at her maid to find her seamstress. The maid grabs and brings to her boss a woman who she thinks is the seamstress just as Sonya rushes in behind them her youngest daughter Baila in tow. When Sonya looks into the face of her long-lost twin, she faints in shock upsetting little Baila. Hereby, Quick roots the saga of Sonya who suffered successive losses—her father who was imprisoned and tortured for ten years by the Tsar’s strongarms only to die within months after his release, her twin sister when their desperate mother parks the twins in an orphanage so they would be fed only to have an unknown French couple snatch her twin, the young man who loves her but moves away with his family to Argentina, her mother who reveals on her death bed that Sonya’s twin did not die in childbirth, her husband Asher (an arranged marriage, father of their two daughters Naomi and Olga) who is killed in a pogrom that destroyed their thriving tailor shop.

 

For a novel delivered in just under 300 pages, the scope of Quick’s story is huge. How does the author handle so many characters and three major geographic locations (Russia, France, Argentina)? Certainly, skipping around in time allows for some things to go unsaid. More remarkably, Quick has many scenes that focus on in-depth character portraits that evolve from the complicated relationships and situations that Quick creates.

 

Take for example Sonya’s 1903 arrival in Paris by train. As a result of meeting Pavlova at a party her brother Daniel holds in his Saint Petersburg home, Sonya unexpectedly travels to Paris to scout out new fashion designs. Pavlova is a client of Daniel’s law practice, and she is intensely jealous of another Russian ballet star whose seamstress is copying dresses of Parisian designs. Awash in guilt that her husband Asher stayed in their village of Kishinev to fill their client orders, Sonya reflects on Daniel’s “tiresome lecture, that Latin men were all unconscionably flirtatious—and that she had to take care not to encourage them in the slightest way.” Daniel has also sent a Monsieur Blum to collect her from the train. However, the first person to greet her and help her from the train is Paul Poiret, one of the fashion designers Pavlova has told her about who is scandalizing the industry with designs that are in demand. The twist in this scene is that Poiret thinks Sonya is Jeanette Dupres, his mistress and Sonya’s missing twin. When Sonya does not recognize him and he never introduces himself, Poiret thinks she is pranking him, after all Jeanette is a stage performer. Quickly the fraught encounter ends as Monsieur Blum presents himself to Sonya and a porter pulls Poiret’s attention to the just unloaded trunk of special fabrics the couturier has come to retrieve.

 

Monsieur Blum, René Blum, who speaks in Yiddish to Sonya when he first meets her at the train station is an interesting minor character. In real life, he was a friend of Marcel Proust, helping Proust get the first novel of his master work À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) published. Quick gives us a cameo appearance of the “lavishly mustachioed, frail-looking” Proust in a vignette where Blum, who has been teaching Sonya’s daughters Naomi and Olga about Judaism and other subjects, admonishes them that lost learning is a theft of time. However, Olga, already an intellectual, is lost in her own thoughts about 1910, the year that she and her mother nearly died because of the devasting Paris flood, the year that brought her family the combative Aunt Jeanette into their lives, and the switch from the Paris Meridian to Greenwich Mean Time resulting in nine minutes and twenty-one seconds of lost time. The look on her face makes Proust ask Olga what she is thinking about. Of course, she answers, lost time, an answer that is both mortally serious for this character and inside-joke hilarious for a reader like the Dresser who studied modern French literature as an undergraduate. Seriously?—little Olga, who is maybe ten or eleven years old, gets to say to Marcel Proust that she is thinking about lost time? Maybe Quick identifies with Olga and What Disappears is the author’s study of lost time.

 

Quick also uses the presence of Monsieur Blum to say something shocking about Jeanette Dupres. In real life, René Blum came from an assimilated Jewish family and was the brother of Léon Blum who played an advocacy role in the Dreyfus Affair and was the first Jewish head of state in France. While the fictional René Blum is rumored to be in love with Sonya, he nearly marries Jeanette. Jeanette in many ways stands in opposition to Sonya. Raised by a French Catholic couple, Jeanette has been taught to be an anti-Semite.

 

While the revelation that Jeanette is Jewish unsettles her and simultaneously explains certain puzzling behaviors and comments from her French family, Jeanette, as a character, seems less understandable than her twin. Except for Paul Poiret saying Jeanette did not support Dreyfus, the young Jewish army captain wrongly accused of being a traitor, it is unclear how Jeanette’s anti-Semitism manifests. Does Blum Learn she is anti-Semitic? Not clear. We do know, however, that she has a mean streak, and we see her slapping Olga in the face. Why is this woman who has had three abortions and desperately wants a child fathered by Poiret so unrepentantly cruel to her niece? Is Olga a stand-in for Sonya, who Poiret seduced? Guess who the father of Baila is, much to Sonya’s shame.

 

 Barbara Quick is exceptionally agile at blending real life events with her fiction. Favorite among these blendings is the Thousand and Second Night fashion party Poiret threw at his home. The fictional Poiret hires all three of Sonya’s daughters to help with the party’s pageantry. Olga reluctantly participates until she discovers she (dressed as a barefoot merchant’s boy) is paired with a charming man who is selling tiny monkeys.

 

“They stroll past pink ibis, flamingoes, and a screaming white peacock wandering over the lawn. Parrots and macaws fly in tiny bursts of color past their heads, making the marmosets whimper in fear. …Carved wooden tables throughout the garden are loaded with every kind of delicacy, which Olga would have felt much better about sampling if the monkeys weren’t constantly clambering down onto her head, into her arms, and then jumping back onto Gaston again.

 

“Several different orchestras are playing softly, also hidden behind the shrubberies, the music growing louder and then fading away again as Olga and Gaston follow the maze of pathways. Here and there they come upon throngs of braziers with blue smoking incense, tended by bare-breasted black-skinned girls. ‘Really, it’s too much,’ Gaston says, reaching down to turn Olga’s wide-eyed gaze away as he and she pass by.”

 

Barbara Quick’s What Disappears from Regal House Publishing will undoubtedly please Francophiles, balletomanes, history buffs, and women of every persuasion from traditionalists to Feminists. Even in its uncorrected proof, this is a novel rich in subject matter and well-turned phrases. Look for the launch of What Disappears in May 2022.