Chapter Eighteen Ginevra

Day three of interviews, the day in which cracks in the perfect surface typically began to show.

Day one was usually: My childhood was pretty uneventful. Normal.

Or else it was: Oh God, my parents were crazy. Followed by affairs and varied chaos that streamed out fast and tangled as Ginevra would note it, murmur soothing refrains, and sift for the gems that lay under the debris.

Ginevra knew: You had to tease out the good stuff. You had to ask questions from many angles. But only at the right time, in the right way. Piano, piano. Ginevra was unusually patient. And she was usually uncannily good at picking main characters who yielded riches, once she prodded them to peel the onion layers back. Ginevra had no dearth of offers for main characters. Thousands of would-be main characters sent letters and emails, begging to be chosen. Bombarded her DMs. Shuttled missives and flowers to her manager, promoting their zaniest stories and quirks and dark thoughts.

But there was an art to choosing a main character. You had to pick someone emotionally stable, capable of great insight and reflection, able to acknowledge their missteps, but also possessing a baseline confidence. Readers didn’t want a flimsy, self-hating character.

Ginevra could admit she’d faltered with her last main character, but Rory would redeem Ginevra—a no-brainer, in every way. Never had Ginevra desired a main character more.

“Tell me more about your father,” Ginevra said, not able to help the sigh that heaved out of her, a release of that sentence that had been stirring around for a while, crying out to be asked.

Daylight streamed in from the wide windows onto Via Borgognona toward the Spanish Steps, Hotel d’Inghilterra, and Palazzo Torlonia. Ginevra loved the view, loved watching the palace softly lit in the night, the people bustling below, finely dressed, young invincible teens on motorini. There was something safe about it—observing life but not exactly participating in it.

“Obviously, your father has been pivotal in your story. It’s important that I get a sense of him, what kind of life he had, because this book isn’t about you alone. It’s about everyone who shaped you and matters in your life. You don’t have to start at the beginning, either. For instance, you can start with one story that your father told you about his life, one that really stuck with you.”

Rory broke off one of the pizzelle Ginevra had set out on a cheery dish she’d gotten ages ago in Capri. Ginevra made a note in her head. Pizzelle—check. Ginevra liked to make her main characters feel comfortable, have their favorite things on hand.

“Papa didn’t talk much about his past. I know he had a very hard life. The Soviet Union was a brutal place, even harder for Jews. It’s difficult for me to imagine him as a child, having lost his father, not having enough to eat. He started a business killing rabbits when he was not even nine just to be able to eat the meat, to sell the skins. His mother mixed potatoes with sawdust to bulk it up. I wish I’d asked him more about it. I really wish…”

Ginevra could tell Rory—highly empathetic as she was—was sinking into painful places, that she was almost uniting with the child version of her father, becoming him.

“We can talk about your father’s childhood later,” Ginevra said gently. “But for now, it will help me to understand, how did he leave the Soviet Union? How did he get out?”

“Ah.” Rory visibly straightened, returned to herself. “He was a refusenik, do you know what that means?”

“No,” Ginevra lied.

Rory nodded. “In the Soviet Union, Jews were discriminated against. On my father’s passport, it didn’t say he was Ukrainian. It said he was Jewish. He wasn’t allowed to practice his religion. Jews were kept out of the best universities. Bullies beat him as a child, because he was a Jew. They beat him when he was in the military, too.” Rory winced, and Ginevra did, too. For Ansel, and also for Ginevra’s father, Domenico, who was a Holocaust survivor.

“But then by his late twenties, Papa was doing well. He’d finished music school, was a violinist in a Moscow symphony, and was sending decent money to his mom back in Ukraine. He visited her a lot. But then she had a sudden stroke and died. He wasn’t there, and he suffered from that enormously, from the guilt, I think, but also the loss. After she was gone, he felt he had nothing left there. So he began to imagine getting out. There was something then… this new law in the late seventies. I forget it.…”

“The Helsinki Accords?” Ginevra supplied. “I study history,” she explained, even though that wasn’t how she knew it. “The West finally recognized the inviolability of the borders of post–World War Two frontiers in Europe. So they no longer challenged the Soviet Union’s grip on its occupied Eastern European countries. In turn, the Soviet Union committed to allow family reunification.”

“Right.” Rory nodded. “It meant that Jews could finally get out, to Israel, if they had relatives there. In practice, all they needed was someone on the outside to send them an invitation, usually manufactured, from relatives apparently in Israel. Once they were out, Jews could then choose to go to other friendly nations, not just to Israel. Papa only knew these things because he listened to this illegal radio station Voice of America, and discussed stuff in quiet among his friends. He used to go to a synagogue in Moscow.… I forget the name.…”

The Moscow Choral Synagogue. But Ginevra bit her tongue to keep quiet.

“Jews used to go to this synagogue, and tourists would go, too. It was very historic. The KGB was always watching, but sometimes a tourist would smuggle an illegal book to Papa, or postcards of menorahs. Usually Jewish foreigners came expressly to help Jews behind the Iron Curtain. Local Jews would go to the synagogue to mingle with the tourists. That’s how Papa ultimately got an invitation to leave. He found… I’m not sure. Two foreign girls, maybe.”

Rory’s face contorted in recollection, then she sighed. “Or maybe an older man. I wish I could ask him. Regardless. They took his address and finagled an invitation to Israel from fake relatives there. And so he applied to leave, but he was refused. Denied by the government. It’s what happened to many Jews during that time—they became refuseniks. Sharansky, the activist, is the most famous one, I guess. He was before Papa’s time, but Papa saw Sharansky protesting and carted away by the KGB. Papa had a good job. But once he became a refusenik, he was considered like an enemy of the state. He was immediately fired from the symphony. They made him go up on the stage and everyone threw food and sour milk on him.”

Rory winced. “He could have been jailed or sent to Siberia on any fake pretext. The government could have invented a crime he’d perpetrated, locked him away. You didn’t ask to leave the Soviet Union and then get the red carpet rolled out for you. Eventually, though, after a lot more turmoil, he did get out—do you want to hear it all now?”

Ginevra could tell it was a lot for Rory, this story. It was a lot for Ginevra, too. The emotional weight of one’s past was best distributed over sessions. It couldn’t all diffuse and process in a single go. “You can save that part for later.”

Rory nodded. “Once he got out, Papa decided on the United States, in the end. He wanted to go to Texas.” Rory smiled. “He’d seen John Wayne movies and dreamed of being a cowboy. But they said the wait for Texas was longer, and Detroit would take him, so he went to Detroit. And soon after he got there, he met my mother and had Max. Then me. He always said we helped him forget everything in his past.”

And Ginevra nodded and scrawled in her notepad. Forget everything in his past, she wrote and underlined it, her heart beating so fast she feared it might fly out of her chest.

He hadn’t forgotten everything. He couldn’t have. Because those tourists, the ones who got Ansel out, who mingled with him outside the Moscow Choral Synagogue—he wouldn’t forget them.

He wouldn’t forget the Italian identical twins named Ginevra and Orsola Efrati.

With identical twins, the embryo splits shortly after conception. Once they are separated, the embryos keep on splitting. With each new split comes the increasing chance that the DNA of the end result is different from the DNA from which it came.

Thus, identical twins can look quite different.

Orsola Efrati was born first—as family lore goes, pink and lovely. Then the heart-rate monitor began to beep wildly, according to the twins’ father, Domenico. The second baby was in distress. The twins’ mother was shuttled into surgery. Eventually, the second baby was born—another girl, but ugly, the cord strangling her neck. She was blue, not getting air. Her nose, even then, looked a little squashed. They called her Ginevra.

Orsola and Ginevra’s mother did not survive their birth.

Ginevra knew that her mother had died birthing the twins, but it wasn’t until Ginevra was seven, when she was coming down the hall to breakfast, that she overheard Orsola say to their father, “I wish Mamma was here on Festa della mamma.”

Ginevra stilled in the hall, didn’t meander on.

“I know,” their father said. “I wish that every day.”

“It’s not fair,” said Orsola, in a voice uncharacteristically down. “Sometimes I feel… oh, I shouldn’t say it. But it’s so hard, not having a mother. And sometimes I even… I know this is vicious, but I feel angry that Ginevra is here, instead of Mamma. Like, Ginevra killed Mamma! Because Mamma was fine—fine, you always say—until it was Ginevra’s turn to come out.…”

Ginevra would never forget it—how she stayed frozen in place, waiting out the infinity until her father responded. Hoping, praying, that he would admonish Orsola. Tell her in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t Ginevra’s fault that their mother had died.

But instead their father just sighed. “Sometimes I feel angry, too. But anger is futile, mia ragazza bellissima. We must accept the cards life has dealt us.”

Ginevra blacked out the moments after. All she remembered was that Orsola had made biscotti and presented them to Ginevra with a smile on her face, like the entire conversation had never even happened. Ginevra couldn’t eat them. She didn’t eat anything for at least an entire week. Just pushed things around on her plate.

And neither her father nor her sister noticed.

The Efratis lived in Rome, in Trastevere by the Tiber, where Domenico was a professor of Jewish studies. He was older already when the twins were born, sparse hair white from Ginevra’s earliest memory. He had survived the Holocaust—ten when he entered the concentration camps, twelve when he was liberated, his entire family erased. He was smart and kind but beaten by life, weary; conversations with him ended by guttural sighs, nights frequently punctured by his awaking in terror.

Orsola was his favorite. Well, she was beautiful, with long dark hair, big brown eyes, and a slim figure. Yes, they were twins, but Ginevra had been spackled with the ugly wand in utero, and Orsola with the pretty one. Ginevra’s hair was coarse to Orsola’s silky, her body was more filled out—a butt where Orsola had none, breasts that surged where Orsola’s were pert and petite. Ginevra’s nose that sat a bit more prominently on her face. Orsola was kind, outside of that conversation Ginevra had once overheard. More than kind, she was easy. Life went her way, whereas Ginevra often felt she was swimming upstream. Ginevra fought with her father—about the clothes she wanted to wear, not as colorful and feminine as those Orsola favored; about cooking, the bulk of the responsibility of which fell on Ginevra because Orsola, ever perfect, took extra Hebrew studies around dinnertime; about reading secular books on the Sabbath, because her father insisted the day was for reset and worship and books strictly of the religious kind. Orsola didn’t give one hoot about reading books, secular or religious alike.

Subtle differences, but important ones. They were twins, and the resemblance was there, but Ginevra grew up knowing she was the tainted one.

Were an outsider to hear Ginevra’s scathing assessment of herself, it might rouse pity. But Ginevra harbored no anger over her lackluster looks; at some point in her childhood she’d accepted it. She did her best with what she had—her later wealth bought her the best facials and creams, dark sunglasses and wide-brim hats, and flowing black dresses made of sumptuous silks and wools to cloak her bulk. Sometimes, though, when she was alone and sad, she stood in front of her bedroom’s gold baroque mirror and shimmied her favorite dress over her frame. She’d bid upon it at auction—once Sophia Loren’s, made of pale pink taffeta, impeccably tailored. It didn’t fit Ginevra, but that wasn’t the point—when Ginevra closed her eyes and the silk caressed her skin, she could imagine for an instant that she was that beautiful and beloved.

As a child, she escaped into books. Her father indulged her with books; outside of the Sabbath he found them a worthy indulgence. She’d hide in the attic, away from her father and Orsola, devouring them. Dark and dank up there. Just a flashlight, and her father always grumbled when Ginevra needed new batteries. The thing Ginevra hated most about reading was the last page, when all of a sudden she’d feel a tidal ache. They were gone, all of them. All her friends, all the pages she’d lost herself inside. As an adult, she thought of it as a little death. That’s what the French call an orgasm. And she supposed that was what it was—the height of pleasure, and then nothingness again, just Ginevra all alone with herself. The End.

She began to study books, how the authors pulled it off. How they got you to care about people in ink. How they surprised you—you were certain one person died, but then you figured out it was someone else. The guy you suspected was bad was the good one all along.

Ginevra tried her hand at stories and found a passion in writing. In seventh grade, she wrote about a woman on her honeymoon who runs off with another man. She wrote about women kidnapped in forests. Her father allowed her to enroll in a creative writing class, and Ginevra was so excited to share her stories, but absolutely devastated when her teacher tore them apart. She said the characters lacked soul. That you could only know your characters as deeply as you knew yourself.

So Ginevra began to write herself into the pages, and her teacher showered her with praise. But even then, Ginevra looked for ways to write around herself. To fully write herself meant excavating great pain. It meant sadness and loneliness and guilt and shame and ugliness. Still, until her early twenties, she wrote. Incessantly. And then for ten years she didn’t. Not a single word. And then Ginevra met the girl in the library. And she realized she didn’t have to write about herself to access emotion, to find real traumas to exploit.

She’d proven her formula, hadn’t she? Ginevra Ex was one of the most successful authors to ever walk the earth. Was she in there somewhere, anywhere, in her books? Maybe. Had to be, she supposed. If you sifted around in corners, probably a couple of shards kicking around. But for the most part, Ginevra didn’t need to access her wounds, her heartaches.

That was what she had main characters for.