My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  “I have some fruit,” my brother was saying. “Everything in the park is ridiculously expensive. Usually I get some bread at the bakery by the Metro.” Suddenly I fell, went down on my knees on the sidewalk. I could hear what my new brother was saying, but I couldn’t see him. Everything had gone dark. I was so cold I couldn’t stop shaking. I pulled my hand away from his and wrapped my arms around me. “My God,” I heard Ilya say, then I felt his arm, warm around my shoulders. “Here, let’s get you on this bench.”

  I felt the curve of cool concrete under me, then I put my head between my knees. Ilya pulled off his blue sweater and wrapped it around me like a shawl. I could see a little now, but everything was swimming with dots, as if the air were alive with the kind of black flies that must have once found a home in the slaughterhouses. Ilya put his hand under my chin, lifted my head, and looked me over. “Did you take anything?” he said. “Are you on something?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t eaten,” I said. “I forgot.”

  “Forgot for how long?”

  I closed my eyes, everything was fading again. I shrugged.

  He left me on the bench, and I shook so hard that I bit my tongue and tasted the sweet salt of my own blood. “Here,” he said. “Take a sip of this.” He slipped a straw between my numb lips. I sucked the straw, not knowing any more than a newborn what to expect. It was Coke, warm, sweet Coca-Cola. The sugar went straight into my blood, rushed to my brain, and the TV picture that was the world clicked on. First in black and white, then in color. Two more sips and even the black static of the flies was nearly gone.

  “Now this,” he said. He was holding a chunk of banana. He must have gotten one from his rucksack and peeled it. He slipped it into my mouth as if I were a baby chimp, being careful of my teeth and his fingers. “You need the potassium.” He kept feeding me bite by bite, until I took the rest of the peeled banana from him and began to feed myself. I could feel him looking at me—smeared makeup, brutal haircut, bruise like a third eye in the middle of my forehead. “You’re a mess,” he said. He brushed his palm over my head, ruffling my inch of hair.

  “At least I’m here,” I said, meaning at least I made it this far, at least I’m alive.

  Ilya only shook his head again. He gave no sign he’d heard me. “And your French is awful.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  He laughed. “Oh, my little sister, that would be so wrong.”

  After a while, we got up and walked slowly out of the park, Ilya holding me by the elbow in case my legs failed me again, his sweater draped over my shoulders as if I were an elderly invalid aunt. In season, Ilya explained, La Sirène ran tours in both directions. This early, there weren’t always enough bookings to make the less popular La Villette to the Seine route worthwhile. Jacques, the captain, and Nolo, who’d helped with the ropes, would take the boat back down to the river. We would take the Metro into the city and be there in a fraction of the time.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, when we were at last seated in a car half-filled with suburban youths headed into Paris for Saturday afternoon, Saturday night.

  “Well, to my apartment, I guess. You have questions, right?” he looked at me.

  “Right,” I said, though at that moment, floating along on a small sugar high from the Coke, I couldn’t think what, exactly, those questions might be.

  “You still look like shit. You’re not going to throw up, are you?’

  I shook my head, then half-closed my eyes. I hoped not. “Good,” Ilya said, and got a book out of his rucksack and started to read. It was a French translation of the life of Harry Houdini.

  By the time we got off at Belleville, I was feeling better. The late afternoon sun was warm on my head as we walked down busy Boulevard de la Villette. I gave Ilya back his sweater and he pulled it on, though neither of us really needed it now. The leaves were just coming out, pale green against the blue sky. Spring was too new, too fresh to be sullied by the exhaust of the cars that rushed by. As we walked, Ilya whistled the Gavotte, going over the tune he’d played on the boat. I noticed he made the same mistakes. A missed sharp here. Half notes for whole. Not careful enough, I thought, not serious. I begin to suspect this as a flaw, as a sign of larger deficiencies in his character. My brother, God bless him, I imagined myself explaining to some mythical someone, is not serious. I, on the other hand, was serious. I had always been serious.

  Look what that got you, the other side of my brain answered. We turned off the boulevard, went down the hole that was the entrance to the Place Ste-Odile. The neighbor was outside her house, perched in the same rickety chair. This time she was scouring a pair of muddy rubber boots with a stiff brush.

  “Madame,” Ilya nodded, coolly, I thought. The woman dipped her chin, barely acknowledging him. Not friendly neighbors. He unlocked the front door with a large brass key, the kind they sold in antique malls in America. He held the door open for me. “The first floor,” he said. I waited for him to open the door just off the entryway so we could go into his apartment. “Not that one.” He pointed to the narrow, wooden stairs. I’d forgotten that in France the first floor is what would be the second in America. On the landing was another door that had to be unlocked by another brass key as long as Ilya’s index finger. He turned it, then pushed open the door with the toe of his shoe, and I stepped into the room I’d seen from the street, the one with the faded velvet curtains. The room was velvet dim. I put out a hand, afraid I might stumble.

  Behind me, Ilya flipped the light switch, and a chandelier flickered to life. I stood, blinking, just inside the door. This is what I saw: a movie set from Kean. No, a room from a museum labeled Paris, 1929. No, that wasn’t right either. I saw a living room with a red plush carpet patterned with roses as big as babies. The plaster walls matched the somber green of the flowers’ thorny stems. The room was small, an apartment-sized space, but it was as stuffed as an antique store with heavy, dark mahogany furniture. To the right of the door sat a red velvet sofa with carved lion heads on its arms and claw feet. Facing it in a semicircle were four equally clawed matching chairs. At each end of the sofa, round marble-topped tables stood covered with black-and-white photographs in ornate frames, autographed photos of Mosjoukine and a dozen other carefully made-up faces that must have belonged to silent film actors and actresses, though I couldn’t put names to them.

  “Welcome to the past,” Ilya whispered in my ear.

  9

  I must have swayed a little, bobbled. Ilya, afraid I might faint again, took me by the elbow and plopped me into one of the claw-footed velvet chairs. A cloud of dust rose up to meet me. I sneezed, sneezed again, then when my eyes stopped watering, I saw a framed picture of Vera Holodnaya on the marble table beside me. Stuck in the bottom of the ornate silver frame was a snapshot of Sophie Desnos, holding two newborn babies, one in each arm. Ilya and Vera. My brother. Me.

  Ilya went through a doorway into the kitchen and made coffee, put lots of sugar in it for me. He handed the cup to me with a slight, polite bow, then he sat cross-legged on the floor and watched me drink.

  “So?” he said. “What do you know? What do you want to know?”

  “This,” I said looking around me, “this was Ivan Mosjoukine’s apartment?”

  “Yes,” Ilya said.

  Ilya had pulled open the curtains, and I could see the living room more clearly. Time had not stood still. The curtains were not the only thing that had faded. The sofa looked more rust than red plush. Squares of an even deeper green checkered the walls, marking spots where paintings had once hung before being taken down, perhaps sold. On some of the tables were stacks of photographs, as if some of the frames, maybe valuable sterling ones like the one that held Vera Holodnaya, had been sold as well. There was still a stunning amount of furniture. Now I could see a baby grand piano pushed up against the wall at the end of the room. From where I sat, I could read the oversized gilt letters of the maker’s name over the keyboard, C. Bechstein, Sr. Major der Kaisers und
Königs, a piano, fit for a king. Next to it, a large armoire and two dressers with beveled mirrors that really belonged in a bedroom huddled together, as if they had come into the living room for company, for safety in numbers. The style wasn’t 1929. The furniture would have been terribly out of date by the twenties. It was the sort of dark, nineteenth-century furniture that would have filled a flat in Moscow before the revolution or even the house in Penza where Mosjoukine had been born.

  A good half of the forest of photographs were of Mosjoukine. I got up, wandered around the room looking. Photographs in frames were arranged on the piano as well. I touched two fingers to the piano keys. One key made no sound, the other made three strings sound at once. All the framed photographs were studio shots, the kind stars used for publicity pictures. I counted four shots of Mosjoukine from Kean, all signed Ivan Mosjoukine with the large looping hand that I recognized from the back of Apolline’s postcard. In another, a young Ivan posed on a couch with a lustrous black poodle, his signature at the bottom indecipherable in Cyrillic.

  Also, Mosjoukine in costume from a dozen other movies I didn’t recognize. In one, he wore the robes of an Orthodox priest. A heavy beard and makeup aged him into the old man he had apparently survived to be. There were also plenty of head shots of him dressed in expensive street clothes, like in Apolline’s postcard. Wearing shirts with French cuffs and heavy gold cuff links. In one, a snappy fedora. He started young in them, then started to age, shot by shot. The focus got softer, but there was no hiding the soft flesh under the eyes, the lines on either side of his mouth that Ilya inherited. I guessed from the clothes Mosjoukine wore that the latest picture was probably from the early thirties. Taken at the dead end of his career, then—nothing. Even in the later ones, he had the most magnetic eyes. They looked out of the photographs like the eyes of the living, saying, Look at me.

  I held up the photograph of Mosjoukine as priest for Ilya to see. “And Ivan Mosjoukine, the silent film actor, was my—our—father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus,” I said. Somehow, until that moment, it hadn’t seemed real. I sat in the overstuffed armchair, sending up a second cloud of dust. “And this,” I pointed at the picture of Sophie holding her twins, “is our mother?”

  Ilya tilted his head to look at the photograph. “Yes, that’s Sophie, our mother.”

  “Anne-Sophie Desnos?”

  He sighed. “So she said.” His answer was as vague as Apolline’s.

  “Does she live here?”

  “No,” Ilya said. “She doesn’t. She’s been dead for years.”

  Oh, no, not her, too, I thought, looking at the photograph of our mother. I picked up the heavy silver frame. I’d come all the way to Paris to find her, and now this was as close to her as I would ever get. “But you knew her?” I asked my new brother, looking for something, anything more. “She raised you?”

  “She was my mother,” he said with a slight shrug, as if that explained everything.

  “She was my mother, too,” I said, setting down the frame so hard, I saw my brother jump. “So why the hell didn’t she raise me?”

  “Come on,” he said, helping me up from the smothering depths of the armchair. “You need to eat.”

  He talked while I sat at the kitchen table and watched him fix dinner. The kitchen was spare, an old two-burner gas stove, a zinc sink, a refrigerator about the size my students had in their dorm rooms. The black metal telephone mounted on the wall looked like it belonged in a museum. On top, a handset rested in a cradle while another round earpiece hung from a hook on one side as if the phone were designed for early conference calls or eavesdropping. The only furniture was a folding table with two folding chairs. Either Mosjoukine had not felt the need to furnish a room as mundane as the kitchen or what had been there originally had gone the way of the silver picture frames.

  “I am making you an omelet,” Ilya announced, cracking four eggs into a bowl, as if he thought an American might not know what an omelet was. It struck me that he was more comfortable talking to me standing up, as if I were still on La Sirène and his presentation of our history were part of the tour. “Listen, for what it’s worth, Sophie always said she tried to get the American colonel to take both of us.” He looked at me, then turned to whipping the eggs. “She said she hadn’t meant to separate us like that, but the colonel said he was too old to raise a son, that he wasn’t going to be playing catch in the yard with a boy when he was sixty.”

  I could imagine the colonel saying those very words. I once heard him snap at a local Scout leader who offered him sympathy for not having a son to take camping, “I slept in enough damn tents in the Army, thank you.” With me, he’d played Scrabble, not ball. I might understand the colonel, but Sophie, a mother who’d wanted to give away both her children, was a mystery to me.

  Ilya turned on the gas, lit a match, and the burner caught with a whoosh of blue flame.

  “How did Sophie know the colonel?” I asked, though I thought I knew the answer to this one from Apolline. He’d been a customer at the bar where Apolline and Sophie worked.

  “Mosjoukine introduced them,” he said. He melted butter in a sauté pan. “Mosjoukine worked for the colonel.” He turned to face me, lifting the pan off the stove for a minute so the butter wouldn’t brown. “You did know that, didn’t you? Your father’s work …”

  I interrupted. “Mosjoukine’s?”

  He shook his head. “No, Mosjoukine is our father. Your father, the colonel. You know what the colonel did for his American army, don’t you? He was in intelligence. Mosjoukine was one of his contacts, his sources. The colonel was Mosjoukine’s boss.” He added the beaten eggs to the hot butter and swirled them deftly so they rose slightly up the sides of the pan.

  “Both my fathers were spies?”

  Ilya shook his head. “Don’t be so dramatic. You sound like Mosjoukine, making life into a movie. It was the cold war, and the Americans didn’t know anything about Russia or Russians, really. Mosjoukine had some answers, that’s all. He knew people, knew what they did, what jobs they held. Things like that.”

  “Why Mosjoukine? Just because he spoke Russian? Paris must have been full of musty, aging White Russians.”

  “He’d been back. Mosjoukine said his father kept writing him letters about how he was starving, how hard everything was back home in Penza. When Mosjoukine couldn’t get work in films, couldn’t send any more money, he went back to help.”

  “After he faked his own death,” I said.

  “After he left the hospital,” Ilya agreed. He flipped the omelet with a well-timed flick of his wrist and held it out for me to see the perfect tan crust on the eggs. He was showing off, but it smelled delicious. “Mosjoukine was in the Soviet Union during the war. He was on the radio there under his American screen name, Ivan Moskine. The authorities knew who he was, but during the war even Stalin had the sense to take what patriotic help Mother Russia could get.

  “After the war, in 1949, somehow Mosjoukine got out. Lucky guy. Before your father, he was working for this crazy American general who was launching balloons stocked with propaganda leaflets in Austria so they would drift over Czechoslovakia. The balloons said ‘Svoboda’ on them—Freedom in Czech—and their drops were triggered by melting dry ice so the pamphlets would fall on Prague and not some potato field. Mosjoukine loved to tell stories about that one.

  “Then in 1953, he made it to Paris and went to work broadcasting in Russian for Radio Liberty. Practically the first story he read on the air was an announcement of Stalin’s death. He enjoyed that. He hated Stalin. The Americans at Radio Liberty fixed him up with a new French passport. He picked the name Adrien Meis for that one.”

  “The name on the bell plate,” I said.

  “In his film The Late Mathias Pascal, Adrien Meis is the name that Mosjoukine’s character takes after everyone thinks he’s dead.”

  “Apt,” I said. Ilya nodded.

  “It appealed to him, though he didn’t use it excep
t when he had to. With people he knew, he preferred being Ivan Mosjoukine. By that time, nearly twenty years after his last picture, fifteen years after his ‘death,’ it wasn’t like anyone was looking for him anymore.”

  “And somewhere in here, he meets our mother?”

  “So she always said. And, ta-da,” he divided the omelet in half with a fork, then slid a portion onto each plate with a flourish, “then there were four.” He chopped some onion, a potato, and added them to the now empty pan.

  “Where was Mosjoukine when we were born?” Watching Ilya was making me dizzy, like following a juggler or a magician.

  “Well, he was there for the beginning, obviously,” my brother said. “Then off on some business for the colonel. You know, just like his movie, Michel Strogoff, where he is the secret courier for the czar? Have you seen that one?” I shook my head. “You probably should. It’s one of his best. It’s very dramatic. He gets blinded by a red hot saber.” Ilya held up his paring knife in front of his eye for a second. Behind him, the potatoes sizzled.

  “According to Sophie, Mosjoukine didn’t know about us until the adoption was over and all he had left was a son, me. He was furious. Apparently he got in such a shouting match with the colonel that the bar owner where Sophie worked called the police on them. Only Mosjoukine was charged, of course.” Ilya patted his shoulder where my father’s oak leaf cluster insignia would have been. “They didn’t put American officers in jail for a little thing like making a scene in a bar.”

  “Did he really do that, Mosjoukine? Get into a fight over me?”

  “Well, he’s the one who told me. So—maybe. Maybe. It was always hard to be sure with him. He liked a good story. It would have made a great scene in a movie, though if he were younger there would have been punches thrown. There’s a fist fight at the end of Strogoff that goes on and on until Mosjoukine is a bloody mess and practically naked. But you shouldn’t forget, it wasn’t just Mosjoukine. If the story is true, both your fathers were fighting over you. Over their little girl.” He took the potatoes off the stove, divided them between the plates. “Your father never told you about any of this?”