My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  “I didn’t when I saw you last, Vanya,” Pavel said. Someone cut in front of us, and Pavel stomped on the brakes, then just as rapidly put his entire weight back on the gas. “But I took lessons.” Ilya laughed, took a pack of cigarettes from the ashtray in the dashboard, lit one with Pavel’s lighter, then calmly smoked the rest of the hair-raising trip into town.

  As we got closer to Moscow, I wiped the window with my sleeve and tried to see the buildings as we passed. This was our father’s country. I expected to feel a tug at my heart strings, maybe to hear my Slavic blood start to sing. It looked vaguely familiar, but half because of old pictures I’d seen in National Geographic—an onion-domed church was illuminated in the distance—and half because the concrete apartment blocks looked like the same depressing structures that ringed Paris, marred Belleville, filled so many of the world’s other cities. “The monastery where you are headed is south of town,” Pavel was saying. “So I got you a suite in a nice old hotel just out of the center.” We turned off the larger road into what seemed to be an older part of the city. “It’s run by my cousin’s nephew.”

  “Your cousin’s nephew?” Ilya said.

  “Well, my cousin’s nephew’s cousin,” Pavel said. Then they both laughed, as if this were code for some deal that was vaguely shady. It felt late. It was suddenly all too hard for me to follow. In the front seat, Ilya started to cough, then seemed to stop himself through a sheer application of will. He threw his lit cigarette out the window.

  “Russian cigarettes,” Pavel said, shaking his head. “Everyone else buys American now, but I still like a smoke with a kick.” He slammed on the brakes, and Ilya pitched forward, nearly slamming his nose into the dash. I looked out the window. We had stopped in front of a stone building with red velvet curtains in the windows like the ones in Mosjoukine’s apartment, though these looked new. The sign on the awning read, Hotel Sputnik. “Your hotel,” Pavel said. Ilya got out, opened my door.

  I stepped out, and for a moment, maybe because of Pavel’s driving, maybe because of the secondhand smoke from Ilya’s Russian cigarette, I couldn’t remember what I was doing in Moscow, the second capital city I had flown to in ten days.

  “What time do you want me to pick you up for the monastery?” Pavel said, feeding me my lines like a stage prompter.

  “Noon,” Ilya said. “His Holiness holds court after lunch. And it’s only Vera. So try and think of something else for you and me to do instead.”

  “Something amusing, Vanya, or something good for you?” Pavel asked.

  “Vera’s the one in charge of redemption,” Ilya said. “So I guess amusement is the right answer to that.”

  17

  Pavel came at 11:30 the next morning. Ilya had just gotten up and was sitting in the living room eating the breakfast that room service sent up, a boiled egg in a brightly painted egg cup, sliced cucumbers, and a pot of strong black tea. Our room, thanks to Pavel, was a large, two-bedroom suite done almost entirely in stiff new red velvet furniture that was a modern imitation of the mahogany that clogged Mosjoukine’s apartment. The Hotel Sputnik, in spite of its name, was trying its best to appear more czarist than Soviet. Ilya was ignoring me, reading or pretending to read the morning paper in Russian. Pavel came pounding in with greetings in French and kisses for me, a crushing hug for my brother. He swept me out of the room with one huge arm around my shoulders. Ilya, he said, he would come back for.

  When we were again in his car and vaulting out into traffic, he said, “I’ve checked out this Father Ivan you’re going to see. He’s the talk of Moscow, or so my girlfriend Kisa says. She has a taste for all this monarchist Orthodox bullshit.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “First, that he’s a schema monk.”

  “A what?”

  “Schema monk. Yeah, I had no idea what that was either. It’s a sort of monk superstar, a special high rank granted by the bishop to a monk willing to surrender his life to save people’s souls. He becomes a walking icon, wears some kind of special robe with crosses and other mystical craziness on it. Kisa called them ‘Angels in the flesh.’ Apparently a schema is usually very old, someone who has struggled long and hard in the monastic life. Does that sound like your guy?”

  I remembered Mosjoukine carrying the naked sword dancer offscreen in Casanova. “No,” I said, “except he is old.”

  Pavel shrugged. “Maybe it’s not the same guy.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, knowing Pavel—and Ilya—were right to doubt the connection between Mosjoukine and Father Ivan. The more I heard, the less possible it seemed. But Ilya hadn’t seen our father in nearly thirty years. Maybe that was long enough for even Mosjoukine to become a living saint.

  “Here,” Pavel took one hand off the wheel and tossed me a cell phone. I caught it. “Just press one. It’s preset for my number,” he said. “I’m going to drop you off and when you are done, call me and wait inside the monastery until I come. This is a bit out in the country, and call me a city boy, but I never think you can trust the damn peasants.”

  It didn’t look like we were out in the country. It looked only a little less built up than Belleville or Batignolles, though the street was narrow and filled with the deepest potholes I’d ever seen in a paved road. The monastery took up a whole block, with a high wall around it topped with a wicked combination of curved spikes, barbed wire, and broken glass. Pavel slammed to a stop in front of a large wooden gate. A small door, set in the larger one, stood open, and a monk in a long black robe stood there helping a steady stream of people, mostly old women, step over the threshold. I’d been wondering how I would explain who I was looking for, but now it seemed all I had to do was follow the crowd.

  “Okay?” Pavel said. He had one foot on the brake, the other on the gas, and the engine was racing. “Somebody will speak either French or English. They get all kinds of pilgrims.”

  “Okay,” I said, opening the passenger door, stepping out.

  “Don’t forget the phone!” Pavel said, then he took his foot off the brake and, like a gas-powered meteor, he was gone.

  The monk spotted me and held out his hand. He had a long black beard and equally long hair that was parted firmly in the middle. His hair was shiny with grease, like either it was against his faith to wash it or he had slicked it down with holy Vaseline. He wore a large silver cross on a chain around his neck. He said something in Russian and, holding my elbow, led me inside, through an inner courtyard. The pavement inside held the melting snow and the spring rain like a wading pool. We splashed through one long muddy puddle. We passed a line of old women in babushkas and men with canes, sprinkled here and there with a teenager in jeans or a better-dressed woman in a fur hat and coat. The monk took me to the head of the line, using one elbow to push a man on crutches back far enough to install me in front of the door to a large stone building that was the monastery itself. Then he bowed. He stood there, bowing again. I finally realized what he was waiting for, opened my purse, and gave him a tip. Or was it a donation? All I had were euros, but that seemed fine with the monk. He tucked the money somewhere inside his sleeve, then picked his way across the courtyard to the gate, trying to hold his robes up out of the flood.

  From the rear of the compound, church bells began to ring. They sounded different than western bells, more like giant gongs, and they tolled first a simple deep rhythm, then an increasingly complicated one, the way an African drummer might, without ever breaking into anything I would have called a tune. Then they stopped. Noon. The doors in front of me opened, and I stepped from the bright courtyard into a space that was both large and dim. As I hesitated, a rush of people pushed past me, forming into ranks near the front of the room. I hurried, too, then, grabbing a place in about the tenth row. There was scuffling as the room behind me filled in. I looked around. It wasn’t a church. It had no altar, no icons. It looked more like a dining hall, long and narrow, with the only windows high up in the walls. It looked remarkably like the gym at the fencing clu
b, except the wooden floor under my feet, instead of gleaming, was so worn, rutted, and dirty that it looked as if cattle or horses had been stabled there.

  I wasn’t sure what would happen now. Would Father Ivan come in to give a sermon? Could a 102-year-old man talk to a crowd this size without loud speakers? I looked around, but there was no sign of a pulpit, with or without a microphone. I heard, but didn’t see, a door open at the front of the hall, beyond the rows of standing pilgrims, then the rubbery squeaking sound of a wheelchair. Half the crowd shifted to the left, as if they knew where the action was going to take place. For one brief moment, before the other half did the same, I could see through the faithful. A tall young monk was pushing someone across the room in the wheelchair. I caught a glimpse of a gray, nearly bald head bent forward on a chest covered by a long white beard. Mostly what I saw was a black robe stiff with elaborate embroidery—a giant, almost cartoonlike cross and, surrounding it, other designs that were harder to make out. I thought I saw Longinus’s spear and oversized nails—spikes really—from the crucifixion. Dense rows of Russian text snaked between the images, making the robe look like a page from a grim comic book. The heavy robe covered the man, trailed down from the wheelchair, giving a pyramidal shape to what otherwise seemed a shapeless thing.

  From the front of the room came a sharp order in Russian, and about half the people in the room prostrated themselves, kneeling and pressing their faces to the floor as if we were in a mosque. Over their bent backs, I got an even clearer look at Father Ivan. But was it Mosjoukine? His head was as overlarge as a baby bird’s and was bobbing slightly, never really rising from his chest. I couldn’t see his eyes. The young monk stood behind him with a couple of older monks, though neither was nearly as ancient as Father Ivan. The woman next to me reached up and grabbed the hem of my black sweater and tried to pull me down to the floor. I stayed standing. One of the monks recited a prayer, and everyone around me mumbled along. I guessed that some, after the decades of atheist communism, had as little experience at being Russian Orthodox as I did. But the older women seemed to have the hang of it. When the prayer was over, the people who had prostrated themselves stood.

  Then nothing happened, or so it seemed. We stood. I couldn’t see anything but the gray, permed hair of the woman in front of me. No one was speaking. The room smelled strongly of wet leather and drying wool socks. I thought about easing my puddle-soaked feet out of my boots. Then we all moved two steps to the left. After about five more minutes, we did it again. It was nearly automatic. I was moved by the people on either side of me without any effort on my part.

  When I reached the end of the row, I saw a woman and a boy with a hugely misshapen head pass by in the company of one of the brothers, headed for the door to the courtyard. Father Ivan must be seeing pilgrims one by one, somewhere in front of the ranks. Now, hands pushed me forward, into the next row of pilgrims and then we all slid right two steps, then again and again until I reached the end of that row. Then I was pushed by hands behind me up into the next, one closer to whatever dispensation we were all seeking.

  I was kicking myself for my hesitation at the door. I had been first in line, thanks to the monk with the sharp eye for an American tourist. If I hadn’t been so stupid, I would have seen Father Ivan up close by now. One way or the other, I would know. I sneaked a peek at the watch on the wrist of the woman next to me. Already it was nearly one. I had moved up one row, with eight to go. If the monks held to this schedule, it seemed unlikely I would get anywhere near Father Ivan before the audience was over for the day at two.

  I couldn’t do anything about it. If I had to, I would come back to try it all again tomorrow. I closed my eyes, letting the eager bodies of my fellow pilgrims move me sideways, then forward. Seven rows to go. The pace of the audiences picked up now, the impatience in the room palpable. Six rows. In front of me, one woman shifted, but the man next to her, asleep on his feet, snoring loudly, did not, and I saw, as through a window, the front of the room and Father Ivan, who was much closer now.

  I saw him put a gnarled claw of a hand on the bent head of the woman kneeling in front of him, then he looked up. His glance was the beam from a lighthouse cutting through a foggy night. I almost flinched as it moved down the row of believers. Then it touched me. Mosjoukine. There was no doubt about it. His eyes had not lost one bit of the power they had in his movies. They were large in his face and blue as deep water. His gaze stopped, sharpened as if his eyes were focusing for the first time. I thought, he knows who I am or at least he knows who I look like. Him.

  Then the other pilgrims in row five shifted the sleeping man to fill the gap and just like that, my father was gone. I started to push my way forward, breaking ranks. The woman who had tried to make me prostrate myself shouted something in Russian, grabbed my sweater, and stretched it, but before she could do anything more, the tall young monk was there. Come to toss me out, I assumed. My row mate let go of my sweater. Instead, the monk said, in perfect California-flat English, “Can you come with me? Father Ivan wants to see you.”

  He led me out of the hall, across the wet courtyard, toward a low, modern building. “I’m Brother Paul,” he said. Paul, not Pavel.

  “You’re American,” I said.

  “San Diego,” he said.

  “How in the world did you end up here?”

  “How did you?” he said. That stopped me. I opened my mouth, shut it.

  We went into the new building, which was some kind of central office. On the desks were a hodgepodge of computers—Macs, old PCs. Brother Paul unlocked a door beyond the office. Inside was a small waiting room with a couch, coffee table, chairs, and piles of old magazines like in a doctor’s office. He gestured at the couch. “Make yourself comfortable. It may be a while.”

  It was more than a while. Just like in the reception room, the only windows were high up in the wall, and these were shaped like slits for pouring hot oil down on invaders. The whole monastery seemed to have been built for defense like a castle. I flipped through a two-year-old Time magazine and a Paris Match. Nothing in the room was in Russian except a pamphlet that, to judge by the pictures, looked like it might be the history of the monastery. There were old black-and-white photographs of other schema monks, or so I judged from their advanced age and their robes, each embroidered with a giant cross, but no picture of Father Ivan. Each copy had an envelope attached—a plea for donations?

  After I’d been through all the magazines, one of the brothers, this one short and Russian, brought me tea and a plate of stiff, chewy-looking cheese sandwiches. I had just been thinking about setting out to find Father Ivan on my own. After putting my tea on the coffee table, the short monk showed me there was a bathroom at the other end of the waiting room by opening the door, turning on the light long enough for me to see the toilet, then turning it off again. Then he left. When he did, I heard the click of a lock. So much for wandering around the monastery unescorted.

  I drank the tea. I picked the cheese out of the sandwiches and ate it. I stretched out on the couch and tried to take a nap, not really thinking I would fall asleep, but I did. When I woke up, I could tell it was late. The slit windows were dark. I went into the bathroom and washed my face. The seam on the vinyl couch had left a nasty red crease on one side of my face, like a Prussian dueling scar. I decided I had better dig Pavel’s cell phone out of my purse and call. Ilya would be worried. Or I hoped he would be. I was worried. Just then, the lock clicked. Brother Paul was back.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Father Ivan had to rest. The audiences are very draining. He’ll see you now.” Brother Paul fixed his calm brown Californian eyes on me, as if weighing my intentions or maybe my soul. “He’s an example for us all, living so long in the faith. He suffered terribly under the communists, you know.”

  I nodded. Stalin killed his father, he’d told Ilya, but I didn’t think Brother Paul was talking about that.

  I followed the tall monk out into the night, across the courtyard, and back
into the deserted hall. He led me through the door at the far end, down one corridor, then another, through door after door. I was beginning to wish I’d saved the sandwich crusts for bread crumbs, when he opened a small paneled door and, ducking low, went into a room. I was right behind him. The room was nearly bare. Was this a monk’s cell? Probably. Except instead of the narrow cot or slab of wood I expected, there was an old-fashioned hospital bed with a hand crank at one end. The head of the bed was raised, and a hospital tray of food was swung over the middle. Sitting up, eating his soup, was my father.

  He put his spoon down, and his eyes hit me again, hot as the sun. God, he was good. When he was looking at me, the image I had of the old man with a head lolling like a bald baby bird dropped away. Instead I saw him as he used to be, as he was in Kean and Michel Strogoff, intelligent, handsome, discerning, with eyes that seemed both wise and ironic, decisive and soulful. No wonder Apolline insisted he was not old when he was with my mother, insisted that he was handsome and desirable. Ilya was charismatic, but Mosjoukine was hypnotic. No wonder he had been a star among stars.

  Brother Paul put a stool by the bed and waved for me to sit down. Then he let himself out of the room. Father Ivan aka Ivan Ilyich Mosjoukine held out a slightly shaky hand, “Hello, my dear,” he said in Russian-accented French. “Which one are you?”

  I took his hand. The bones were so light inside the wrinkled skin, I felt I could crush them like so many potato chips, hurt him if I so much as sneezed, but his grip on my fingers was strong, pure will overcoming the limitations of flesh. No wonder he had lived to be 102. He was stronger than I would ever be. “I’m Anne-Sophie Desnos’s daughter.”