My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  I expected him to say, “Wait and see,” but instead he said, “My fencing club.”

  “Your club?” I remembered the photograph of him with the mask and sword. The redhead. Had she been his wife?

  “Well, once upon a time,” he said. We climbed a wide flight of stairs up to some kind of gym. Ilya banged the double doors open like he owned the place, like we were Mosjoukine making a star entrance.

  An old man in heavy black glasses sitting at a desk in the foyer sprang up, as if standing at attention. “Monsieur Desnos!” he said, holding both hands out.

  “Petrov,” Ilya said. Petrov looked as if he has seen the ghost of the czar, but Ilya just waved as we went by. We climbed another flight of stairs. Ilya threw open a second set of doors, a little less vigorously this time. Inside was a long, high-ceilinged room. On the opposite wall, there were windows high up on the wall, and the last light of day flooded across the polished hardwood floor. At the far end, a match or a lesson was in progress. Two fencers in white padded jackets and wire masks lunged, retreated, lunged again, their shoes sliding forward and backward across the floor.

  He nodded toward the pair. “That’s épée,” he said. He pointed at a rack of thinner bladed weapons against the wall. “These are foils, but for what we’re doing, either would do.” Ilya took a foil from the rack. He whipped it, experimentally, through the air, then put it back, took another. “For the beginning students,” he said, as if explaining some obvious lack of quality I couldn’t see. We were standing on a narrow strip of rubber matting. Ilya stepped onto the wood floor, then looked at my feet. “Take off your boots,” he said to me, “or you’ll leave marks on the floor. You can do this in your socks.” I leaned against the wall, pulled off the boots, then set them by the rack.

  I looked over at the fencers in their protective gear. Ilya followed my glance. “You don’t need all that,” he said. “You won’t be fighting anyone but yourself.” He handed me the foil. I took it the way I had been trained by the colonel to shake hands, firmly, fingers together, thumb curled. It wasn’t heavy. It probably only weighed a pound, but I found holding it level to the ground, away from my body, surprisingly tiring. Ilya stood behind me, his arms wrapped around me. He adjusted my grip, “Like this,” he said, rearranging my fingers. “Looser. It won’t run away.”

  He kept his arms around me, his hands on my hands, his knees behind my knees, “Forward, like this,” he said, and we slid forward, lunging the way I had seen the other fencers do. “Then back.” We retreated. Lunged, retreated. “Keep the tip up,” Ilya said. We lunged. “Don’t drag your feet.” I felt I was getting a sense of the rhythm, but it was like dancing the tango with a master. I was being moved by Ilya. My movements had nothing to do with me. I was holding the foil, but I wasn’t the one fencing. Ilya must have felt the same way. He let go and stepped back. I let my arm drop. Already my fingers were starting to feel numb.

  Ilya sighed and pushed the hair that had escaped from his ponytail out of his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s try something else. I just want you to move. For once, you should move without worrying where all the pieces of your body are. You know. It’s your body. You know.” He took the back of my neck between his thumb and forefinger. “Here,” he said. “Everything is centered here. Don’t think about your arms. Don’t think about your feet. See what you want to reach, what you want to hit, and you will be there without having to move an inch. It’s like flying,” he said in my ear. “Like flying in a dream.”

  I closed my eyes and raised the sword. I moved forward. I moved back. I lunged. I retreated. I can’t say I moved with startling grace, but I felt what my brother was talking about. I felt my body moving as a whole inside its flexible skin, and it seemed I could feel, not just see, the fluid ease that Ilya shared with our father. The body answering the brain before the message was sent. The foil as an extension of the body, the body a part of the soul. I felt sweat under my arms, running down my back. I felt the knit suit of my muscles. I kept going, again and again. Lunge. Retreat. Lunge.

  A man’s voice called, “Ilya!” I opened my eyes. My brother let go of my neck, and I went limp, like a marionette whose strings are cut. Then the unaccustomed exertion hit me, and I bent over, panting. One of the fencers was bounding across the floor, pulling off his mask and glove as he came. “Ilya!” he said again. Then he grabbed my brother in both arms, in a bear hug, and lifted him off the ground. He thumped him hard on the back.

  “Georges,” Ilya said. “You’re going to break me in half.”

  Georges put Ilya down. “What are you doing here?”

  Ilya nodded at me. “Giving a lesson. We just started.”

  “No more,” I said, still trying to catch my breath. “Not tonight.”

  “Here then,” Georges pulled off his jacket and held it out with the glove and mask for Ilya to take. “You can finish mine.” He waved to the other fencer, who was watching us, one leg bent like a dancer at rest. I could see she was just a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen.

  Ilya looked at the gear in Georges’ arms. “Okay,” he said. “Why not? Since you are too lazy.” He pulled off his sweater and handed it to me. He put on the jacket, tucked the mask under one arm, then took the épée Georges offered hilt first. Ilya bowed slightly, then turned his back on us, tried a lunge. He walked across the gym to the waiting student, bowed to her, put on his mask. They stood en garde, then the lesson began. From the moment Ilya took Georges’ weapon, he was a different person. No, that’s not right. He was completely himself, at ease, for the first time since I’d met him. He moved like water. He moved like a man happy on his feet.

  I was sweating like a pig. Georges offered me a towel, then a cup of water from the cooler by the door. “You’re a friend of Ilya’s?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “You’re kidding,” Georges said. He looked at me. “No, I take that back. I can see you’re his sister. I just didn’t know he had one.”

  “Have you known him a long time?”

  “Since we were ten and our fathers brought us here for lessons.”

  Our fathers. So Mosjoukine had started Ilya fencing.

  “Listen,” I said, sensing a chance to learn something about Ilya beyond what he’d been willing to tell me. “If he fenced for so long, why doesn’t he do it anymore?”

  “You know about Barbara?” Barbara, I guessed from Georges’ tone, was the dear departed wife. I shrugged, as in I know a little. “Yeah, well,” Georges said, “he doesn’t like to talk about her. That’s when he quit. Right before the Championships.”

  “Was he good?”

  “Ilya? He was ranked tenth. Not in épée, in saber. And everybody knew that ranking was low. He was about to move up.”

  “Tenth in France?” I was impressed.

  “In the world.”

  I looked at Ilya. He had his mask off now, was smiling at the girl he’d given the lesson. I had never seen him smile like that. But then, I had known him no time at all. “Mademoiselle,” he said, bowing. She bowed back, then headed for a door at the far end of the room that I guessed led to the locker rooms. Ilya came over to join us. “Thanks, Georges,” he said, tossing Georges his épée. Georges caught it. Ilya stood, wiping his face with a towel. He was breathing hard, more out of shape than I would have guessed.

  “Any time, old friend,” Georges answered. “Any time.” Then Georges took my hand in his and bowed over it. I had never seen so much bowing. Formality seemed to come with the sport. “Look after your brother,” he whispered to me, loud enough for Ilya to overhear him. “He needs it.”

  I caught Ilya looking at me sideways, wondering what else Georges might have said while he was fencing.

  “Come on,” Ilya said. “I’m sweaty as hell, but we might as well walk home to shower. I don’t keep clothes here anymore.” He took his sweater from me, and I followed him out of the gym.

  The old man at the desk was on the phone when we got down the stairs. He called after Ilya,
“Come back, Monsieur Desnos, please! Don’t be such a stranger! People still call to ask if you are taking students!” Ilya waved a hand over his head as we went through the door, making no promises that I could see.

  The air outside struck me as chill. I felt the sweat on my chest and back dry, then goose bumps start up on my bare arms. I shivered. Ilya peeled off his sweater and pulled it down over my head. “I’m going to buy you one,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Why did you stop fencing?” I asked. “Georges says you were very good. Was it Barbara?”

  “Oh-ho, so Georges was wagging his tongue, old dog,” Ilya said. “Barbara. Now you have a name.”

  “Stop joking for once,” I said. “You don’t take anything seriously. I want to know.”

  Ilya stopped and looked at me. He opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and shut it again. It was the perfect silent movie pantomime of indecision, but he wasn’t acting. We were passing a church. Ilya sat down on the steps with a motion of complete collapse, the way Mosjoukine might have done if this were a comic scene. Then Ilya patted the cement beside him. I sat down. “Okay,” he said, “okay, you’re right. Barbara was my wife.” I thought of the snapshot on his corkboard in his room. His beautiful, red-headed wife.

  “And …” I prompted.

  “She was a doctor. That’s how I met her. She fenced a little—she wasn’t good. So we signed her on as team doctor. For her real job, she worked at the hospital.”

  “At St-Louis?”

  “Yes,” he said, “in surgery, not the usual specialty for a woman. They were tough on her. She worked the worst hours. She worked harder than any of them. She made a point of it.” Late hours, St-Louis, this was beginning to sound familiar, and I felt a sick vibration in my stomach. Ilya nodded, guessing what I guessed. “Yes, I told you this story already, only without the names. She started to take cocaine, then mixed it with pills. She’d come home, and there was nothing I could do.” He stopped, perhaps remembering all that he had tried. “Nothing could help her sleep. So more pills. I was stupid. I was blind. I thought, she’s a doctor. She knows what she’s doing. And, I mean, I was an athlete. I knew what guys did, even in my sport. You did what you had to. That’s what we all said.

  “Then everything seemed to get better. She got a promotion. The old bastard who had given her the worst time got an even bigger promotion, and suddenly he wasn’t there, holding her sex over her head. She started sleeping again, eight, ten hours. No problem. And I was on fire. In matches, I just couldn’t lose. I had my pick of students, no matter how much I charged for a lesson. I was headed everywhere I wanted to be. Then,” he put his head down for a minute, “it got even better. Barbara was pregnant. We were so damn happy. Georges was going to be the godfather. Barbara was the happiest. She was ready to forgive everyone. Even the bastards at the hospital. She wanted me to feel the same way. If the baby was a boy, she wanted to name him after …”

  “Mosjoukine,” I said, though it didn’t really need saying.

  “‘Forgive and forget,’ she said. She really wanted a little Ivan. The tapes you watched? I got them for her. She said she wanted to see what the first Ivan Ilyich was made of. Then …”

  “Yes?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Then I went to a tournament in Zurich. Georges, too, though he wasn’t ranked. I got back late, had to take a taxi from the club. I saw the lights on and thought Barbara had waited up.” He rubbed his palms over his face. His hands were shaking. “I went into the kitchen and the first thing I saw was blood, everywhere, across the floor, into the bathroom. She was sitting on the floor next to the tub.” He stopped. He stood up, as if this were the end of the story.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He sat down again, less a change of mind than a failure of will or muscle, as if he found he hadn’t the strength to get up after all. “She’d been on morphine the whole time.” Oh, I thought, the neighbor, the bloodsucking spider. “That was why Barbara was sleeping so well. That night she went into premature labor but was too high to do anything about it. Too out of it to care. She’d given birth to the baby, but she was just sitting there. Just sitting there with the baby beside her on the cold bathroom floor.”

  “But she was okay.”

  “Oh, okay. Sure. She’s okay even now.”

  “She didn’t die?”

  He gave me a look of complete irritation. “What is it with you and dying? Not everyone dies. The truth is you can do terrible things in this world, to yourself, to other people, and in the end, you just go on living. Look at me. I’m alive.”

  “What did you do? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “She was my wife. She was pregnant with my child, and I was off playing games in Zurich. I should have known, but I refused to see. Does that make me innocent or even more guilty?”

  “What happened to Barbara?” I said.

  “She moved to Australia,” he said. “They let her practice medicine there. I hear she is married again. I hear she has a son.”

  “Was it a boy you lost?” I asked.

  “Lost?” he said.

  “The baby, the miscarriage.”

  “I didn’t say the baby was dead.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  Ilya took me by the arm. His fingers pressed hard into my skin, each one a small circle of bruising. “Listen, I am going to take you somewhere. But when it’s done, you are never, ever to mention it again. Do you understand? You are not even to imply to me you know. Not even look at me like you know. Get it?”

  I used my hand to pull his fingers off my arm. “Yes, I get it,” I said, though I didn’t.

  We turned around, heading east. Ilya walked so fast I could barely keep up. I was already tired from the fencing lesson. My arm was sore where he had grabbed me, and the ankle where he had whacked me with the barge pole hurt. I was beginning to think my brother was crazy and maybe even dangerous.

  Now we marched further from anywhere I had ever been, until I thought we would cross the Périphérique, fall out of the city into the sad outer ring of suburbs. We stopped just short, though I could hear the roar of the traffic beyond.

  Ilya led the way up a wide flight of stairs to a white cube of a building next to a church. Ilya opened the glass double doors gingerly, though with the same determination as the doors to the fencing club. As soon as he did, I smelled disinfectant and cut flowers and urine, the smells of a hospital. Inside, I saw it wasn’t a hospital exactly, more a nursing home. There was a large lobby with one knot of elderly men and women arranged around a television set with the sound down and another half-dozen facing each other in a conversational grouping that didn’t seem to include any actual conversation. One pair of old men played dominoes. The clicking of the tiles was the loudest sound in the room.

  As soon as we stepped through the doors, a nun materialized from behind a counter. She was young, I could tell that from her face, but she was wearing what a lapsed Catholic friend always called the Full Penguin, the kind of black-and-white floor-length outfit American nuns didn’t seem to wear anymore. She recognized Ilya, but she didn’t look especially glad to see him.

  “Monsieur,” she said, but Ilya did not stop. He went straight for a flight of marble stairs. On the landing, another nun sat behind a small desk doing paperwork. She, too, recognized Ilya. “Ah, Monsieur Desnos. I’ll have to ring for permission. I thought we agreed last night …” She picked up the phone, but Ilya did not stop. I followed him left, down a hall. I heard the nun hit a buzzer. Off to the right were hospital rooms with children in the beds. All sleeping, though it seemed early, and certainly the old people downstairs were still awake. Some of the rooms were painted bright colors, with posters covering nearly every inch of the walls. Some were bare. Ilya was moving so fast I fell behind.

  I passed a room with a nun bending over an enamel basin. I stopped. She was bathing one of the children, and then I saw why the children were so still. It was a boy, proba
bly a teenager, but he was hardly bigger than Julia had been. His eyes were opened but unfocused, his mouth gaped. He was profoundly retarded. In high school I had volunteered for a while at a state hospital, one that had been emptied of all but the most severely mentally handicapped, that tiny portion who needed help with everything. Even there, some had been able to move, understand a bit of speech. Not this boy, if I was any judge.

  The nun saw me and smiled. She stroked the boy’s hair, and I heard her say, “Look at the pretty lady, Jules. Doesn’t she have the prettiest blue eyes?”

  Behind me, I heard the starchy rustle of nuns. I turned to see the young nun from downstairs and a much older sister who I guessed by the way she walked, heel toe, heel toe, was in charge, the Mother Superior, if that was the right title for this brand of nun. Ilya had disappeared, but they were rushing to find him. I followed.

  We found him through another set of double doors in a ward with two facing rows of hospital beds. All of the beds were empty except for one at the end of the room, and it was closed off with movable glass screens, designed, perhaps, so a nursing sister could see in, while offering a little quiet, a little privacy. The whole setup looked like a fish tank. Inside a tiny girl lay in a fetal position with tubes in her nose and stomach, intravenous lines running into one outstretched arm, which was tied with gauze to a padded board to keep it straight enough for the fluids to drip into the small veins.

  The Mother Superior had reached Ilya before he reached the girl in the aquarium. Or maybe Ilya had stopped on his own, because she wasn’t touching him or restraining him in any way. They just stood there, watching the nothing that was happening. As far as I could see, the girl wasn’t even breathing. No, she was, but barely. Her chest rose a little, sank.

  I turned to find the young nun standing beside me. Where had she been? I thought she’d been in front of me.

  “Is that Monsieur Desnos’s child?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Anne-Sophie.” Anne-Sophie. A child named after not our father but our mother. Ilya took a step forward, but the Mother Superior put her hand on his arm. He stopped.