My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  I couldn’t believe it. Surely Mosjoukine was inside the monastery. It was just these crowds he didn’t want to see. He would want to see me and Ilya. “We’re going in,” I said and tried to push through the solid mass of people drawn by the general air of outrage, the chance to shout and be angry for no particular reason except that life was hard and getting harder every day. I had to see for myself. I was willing to climb over or under or beat my way through. The crowd was not going to get in my way.

  Then I felt Ilya’s arm around me, across my chest in a fireman’s hold. I kicked my legs up, tried to break away, but his arm was an iron bar. He might be shooting his body full of morphine, but the muscles from his years of fencing were still there. He dragged me backwards, out of the crowd. “Stop it,” he hissed in my ear. “You are going to get yourself hurt.” I let my body go slack. He loosened his grip, thinking I had come to my senses. I swung around, my hand already a fist, and hit him hard on the side of his head, catching him across his left ear.

  “You, you …” I spit at him. I wasn’t sure what the end of the sentence was going to be, except that this was his fault. If he had come with me the first time, if he had cared a little, just a little, we could have been a family.

  Just as fast, he hit back, slapping me hard across the face. “You are fucking crazy,” he said.

  He was right. At that moment, I was more than insane, but before I could hit him again, he was down, first bent over from his waist, then on his knees, coughing. I went down on my knees beside him. “I’m sorry. Oh God, Ilya, I’m so sorry,” I said, over and over. He nodded, too out of breath to talk. I felt something wet on my face and looked up. It was snowing big white flakes. It was a March snow storm. White swirled over the crowd, settled on the fur hats and knotted scarves of the angry believers.

  It fell on Ilya’s bare head. He put his hand on my shoulder, and together we got up. I looked around, wishing I knew the Russian word for doctor, when I saw that the taxi we’d come in was still there. It had been trapped by the crowd and was inching its way past us, trying not to run over too many feet. I opened the back door as it passed, shoved Ilya in, and hopped in myself.

  The driver looked back, said something in Russian, probably Get the hell out of my cab.

  “The hotel,” I said. “We need to go back to our hotel.” He knew where we’d come from. He could damn well take us back.

  He glared at me and at Ilya, slumped in the corner. Someone in the crowd beat on his trunk, then someone else joined in banging on the hood. He shrugged, stepped on the gas, and we were out of there.

  By the time we were on the highway, Ilya was sitting upright. “Don’t look so worried,” he said, pulling out another old joke. “It only hurts when I breathe.” Neither of us laughed, because what he said was too obviously true. It was snowing harder, a real blizzard, though the snow melted as it hit the dark pavement of the highway. It stuck on the trees and on the tulips open in the window boxes we passed as we entered the city.

  We arrived at the hotel nearly as quickly as if Pavel had been at the wheel, the taxi driver eager to be rid of us. I held out a wrinkled wad of bills, and he carefully picked through it. Ilya was outside, leaning against the cab, still breathing hard. Then he shifted to the skinny tree caged in the sidewalk by an iron paling. Snow was building up in a small drift at its roots. Just as the taxi driver finished his careful examination of my euros and took a couple of bills, including what I assumed was a once-in-a-lifetime-sized tip, I saw out of the corner of my eye that Ilya was bent double again, hanging on to the sapling with one hand, coughing harder than ever. He was sick, really sick.

  I went to help him into the hotel. Looking down at the fresh snow I saw bright red blood. Ilya raised his head, and his lips were just as red. I wiped his mouth with the sleeve of my black sweater. “Come on,” I said, “just a little further and we’re home.” The home part wasn’t true, but we did make it to the hotel room, and he went straight to the bathroom. I heard him retching in the toilet, then coughing again, as if his lungs might come up. I took Pavel’s cell phone out of my purse and pushed the number one. The phone rang and rang. I threw it on the couch. Ilya was out of the bathroom now. He sat on the edge of the bed in his room, his head in his hands. I glanced into the bath. There was blood spattered on the lid of the toilet, drops splashed across the bright white of the tile.

  “We have to call an ambulance,” I said to Ilya. I headed for the house phone by his bed. “I’ll call the desk, they’ll know …”

  “No,” Ilya said. He raised his head. His lips were crusted with blood.

  “We have to. This isn’t a joke. You’re really sick.”

  “Yes,” Ilya said. Just that. Yes. Then I saw it. I had been blind, but now I could see. Blind was better.

  “Oh, God,” I said, my hands flying to cover my mouth, to hold back the words. “You’re dying.”

  He nodded. He had told me he’d been sick after Anne-Sophie was born. I had seen his picture with almost no hair.

  “Cancer?” I said.

  “In one lung the first time,” he said. “They operated. Did chemotherapy. They thought they’d caught it in time.”

  “And now?”

  “I know it’s come back.” He pointed at his chest, made a motion as if he were crossing himself.

  Suddenly, stupidly, I was angry again. I said, “I can’t believe it. I find you. I just find you, and now my brother is dying.”

  Ilya held out his hands. “I’m not your brother,” he said. I blinked, shook my head. Was all this some kind of scam, some hallucination? Was I really that crazy? I closed my eyes, opened them, half expecting to see a stranger who looked nothing like me sitting on the bed. It was still Ilya, a man with my eyes, my nose, my face. He said it again, “I’m not your brother,” holding out his hands, empty, palms up, beckoning me.

  I took his hands, sat down beside him on the bed. “You are.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to be if this is all it brings you. Three months ago, when I started coughing again, I thought my only worry was not dying before Anne-Sophie. Now …”

  “Shhh,” I said, holding up one finger. “Shhh.”

  “I couldn’t tell you, not after hearing about your family. I tried to get you to go home. I threw a coffee pot at your head, for God’s sake.” I could feel his pulse racing in his wrist, but he wouldn’t be quiet. “In Romain Gary’s memoir, Gary survives the war so he can tell his mother he’s become a pilot and a hero of France just for her. Did I tell you that part?” he asked. I shook my head. Ilya drew a shaky breath, went on. “Gary gets letters from his mother all during the war, but he’s never sure his are getting through to her. Then, after D-Day, he makes his way back to Nice—only to find his mother’s been dead for three years.” My brother shook his head. “Knowing she was dying, she wrote him hundreds of letters and left them with a friend to mail, so he wouldn’t know she was gone until the war was over.” Ilya paused. “I thought, if I could get you to leave, I could write you for as long as I could, then just disappear. You’d never need to know …”

  I put my finger to his lips. “It’s better to know,” I said. “It’s always better.” I told him how, when I was in kindergarten, I’d come home one day to find my parakeet Ginger, the one the colonel had bought me at Woolworth’s, missing. Livinia told me while she was cleaning her cage Ginger had flown out the open kitchen window. “For weeks I looked in every tree, calling Ginger, Ginger, Ginger. I was sure she would starve without her birdseed bell. ‘No,’ Livinia said, ‘someone else will find her and give her a good home.’ Then, years later, Livinia confessed to me that she’d lied about Ginger. ‘I found her on the bottom of her cage. Feet up, eyes closed,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to think she’d gone on to better things.’ I just sat there, unbelieving,” I told Ilya. “How could she believe it was better for me to worry about Ginger every day than to know the truth? I’d rather know. Even this, I’d rather know.”

  Ilya shook his head
again. “Two weeks ago, you didn’t know you had a brother. You didn’t know I existed. You could have gone on not knowing.”

  “I knew,” I said. “I must have. Why else did I fly to Paris with nothing but a toothbrush?” I rested my forehead against his. His skin was hot and dry. I could feel his body shaking. For the first time since I’d known him, Ilya was the one crying.

  18

  I put ilya to bed and cover ed him. He was shivering, though the hotel room was overheated and stuffy. I laid next to him and wrapped my arms around him to warm him. He was on his side, trying to catch his breath, trying not to start coughing. How could I have not known he was so ill? How had he kept going? I’d seen him fencing, damn it. I could feel his heart beating, feel the energy there, the will, the fierce control that I’d felt during my visit with Mosjoukine in the monastery. It was what kept them both alive. Another trait of our father’s I didn’t share.

  His eyes closed, drifting into sleep. I stayed awake.

  I thought about Mosjoukine. Where was he now? If he had known I was coming, would he have asked me, not some younger sibling, to take him away? Would he have asked me to take him back to Paris?

  “Too old,” Ilya said, without opening his eyes, and I realized I must have said what I was thinking aloud. I poked him.

  “He was a young 102,” I said, joking. Even at 102, Mosjoukine was not too frail for life in Paris.

  “Not him,” Ilya said. “You. He always goes for the younger woman. It’s the movie star in him.”

  I said, “Forty-two is young to a man over 100.” Ilya started to laugh, then cough, and I had to get him a wet towel and hold his head. When he was done coughing, I could feel his heart beating in his chest, as if it were a bomb ticking, as if his life were a clock running down.

  Ilya woke up at dusk. The morphine he’d gotten from Pavel’s friend was wearing off, and his eyes were bright and wet with the pain. His breathing was fast, and shallow. “You’ll have to go to the pharmacy for me,” he said. “You can take Pavel’s note.”

  So I went out into a new snow, because I couldn’t say I wouldn’t, even though the idea of buying drugs in this illegal way in a city I did not know, in a country in which, as Mosjoukine had told me, there were prisons inside of prisons, scared me so much my hands shook. The pharmacist let me charge the drugs to my credit card. He gave me three vials. He spoke perfect English. He told me he’d studied one year at the Mayo Clinic. Did I know the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota?

  Yes, I said, I certainly did. It was near my house in America, or at least only a few states away.

  He liked Minnesota, he said, except that the winter was so bitterly cold. Colder, he insisted, than in Moscow. Then he counted out three disposable syringes with needles, still sealed and sterile. “These are harder to get than the morphine,” he told me. “So don’t lose one.” Then he gave me instructions. I could give my brother no more than two injections in six hours.

  “What would happen if I did?” I asked. I was pretty sure Ilya had been taking them nearly that often. What if it wasn’t enough?

  “An overdose will suppress his heart rate,” the pharmacist said. “He’ll stop breathing.”

  Back at the hotel, Ilya sat dressed on the couch with a fresh bottle of vodka, trying to work on the pain shot by shot. He took the bag from the pharmacy into the bathroom. I had the strong sense it wasn’t good to mix the two, but we had moved beyond that, really. We were way out to sea in the fog of what-the-hell-difference-does-it-make. He looked better when he came out. It was past dinner time, but neither of us mentioned food. “I should show you how to do that,” he said to me. “Are you squeamish about needles?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Not about getting shots anyway.”

  “You might have to do it for me, sooner or later.”

  Later seemed overly optimistic. “No problem,” I lied just a little. “I can do it. I do tougher things every day.” He kissed me on top of my head.

  “Take me back to Paris,” he said. “I want to sleep in my own bed.”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” he said, handing me the cell phone off the couch. I rang Pavel, and this time he answered. I handed the phone to Ilya. Whatever Ilya said, he managed it in Russian. I looked out the window, pretending not to be trying to listen, pretending not to wonder what he’d said. “Pasha’s bringing the car around,” Ilya said after he got off the phone. I went downstairs and paid our bill with my miraculous credit card. We sat side by side on the couch until Pavel knocked on the door.

  Pavel took us right to the gate at Sheremetyevo Airport, though there were concrete barriers that implied parking was forbidden. He took us to the door of the Aeroflot plane. He hugged Ilya, whispered something in his ear. Ilya laughed, a flush of color rising in his cheeks. Then Pavel gave me a bone-cracking squeeze. “Take care of your brother,” he said, whispering in my ear. “He’s a good man. He deserves to be loved.” After a round of rapid-fire Russian from Pavel directed at the gate attendant, we were on a flight on which we had never booked a seat, without anyone so much as checking our passports or tickets.

  “What did Pavel say to you?” I asked when, after a steep and bumpy takeoff, we were finally up in the air.

  “Pasha?” Ilya said. “Just now?” He took my hand. “He asked me how come if we were friends, I never told him I had such a good-looking sister.”

  I told Ilya that as soon as we got to Paris, we would take a cab to the nearest hospital.

  Ilya shook his head. “No,” he said. “I won’t go. I know what will happen.”

  I started to protest.

  He put his fingers over my lips, leaned close to my ear. “I won’t end up like Anne-Sophie.” I thought of her glass cell, the snaking clear tubes.

  “I won’t let them do that to you,” I told him. “No matter what. I promise. But I have to know they’ve done everything. Did the doctors tell you there was nothing more they could do?”

  Ilya looked away from me, shook his head. “No.”

  “Then we have to try. We have to go to the hospital.”

  “All right,” he said, nodding. “But I want to go home first. Just for one night, okay? What difference could that make?”

  I hesitated. I couldn’t frog-march him to the hospital against his will. I needed his cooperation.

  He took my hand. “Please?”

  I gave in. “Okay. We’ll go to the doctor tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” Ilya said. “I think I deserve to sleep in.”

  We landed in Paris at midnight.

  We walked slowly through Charles de Gaulle, past the immigrant workers mopping and waxing the vast terminal floor. Then we went outside and got into a cab. Ilya closed his eyes until we were almost into the city, then he opened them and smiled like a child when he saw the lights of Paris.

  “Oz,” I said.

  “Heaven,” he said. “Or, at least, earthly paradise.”

  The taxi driver parked his cab at the entrance to the Place Ste-Odile. He helped me get Ilya, who was unsteady on his feet, down the passageway and to the front door of Number 44. “My God,” he said, looking around the deserted courtyard. “I bring people to the hospital to visit relatives and see doctors all the time, and I had no idea this was here.” I gave the driver the last of my cash.

  Ilya insisted he could get himself up the stairs, and he did. As I unlocked the door, I realized that the phone was ringing, and Ilya pushed past me to answer.

  I followed, carrying his rucksack. Ilya was leaning against the kitchen wall, talking into the receiver. I could see his legs shaking with either the effort or a chill.

  “Yeah, Nolo, I believe you Jacques was pissed,” I heard Ilya say. The boat. Ilya had stood up Jacques and Nolo, gone missing just as the spring tourist season heated up. Ilya listened to Nolo, nodding. “Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him I’m not feeling well.” More nodding, more listening. Ilya had stopped shivering. “No, don’t worry. Vera is here. If you want
to come over, come next week. I’ll be better by then. Tell Jacques you have my blessing. I knew you could do it. With enough tips you can buy the damn boat.” Ilya said good-bye and hung up the phone. He sat down at the kitchen table, winded. I sat down next to him.

  “Nolo did the tour himself?” I asked.

  Ilya nodded. “He’s heard me often enough. The old ladies loved him.” Ilya gave a little hoarse laugh, too close to a cough for comfort, and I held my breath as I watched him try to catch his. When he had, he put his hand over mine and seemed to take a minute to count my fingers one by one. “Are you afraid, Vera?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I was so afraid I could hardly breathe.

  “Don’t be,” he said, squeezing my fingers hard.

  “So the old bastard was right?” I said. “Never be afraid.”

  Ilya started to laugh again, then thought better of it. “I was wrong about the bastard part. His parents were married. You and me, we’re the bastards. We can’t help it. We were born to it. So you know what? No more worrying about anybody else, Vera.” He let go of my hand and tapped me lightly with one finger on the chest. “You should think only of you.”

  I looked him right in the eyes, holding him with my eyes the way Mosjoukine would have. “Don’t you dare tell me to leave,” I said. “Don’t even think it.”

  Ilya looked down. “No,” he said. “I won’t ask you to go. You have to take me to the hospital tomorrow, remember?”

  Ilya stood up, putting his hands on the table to steady himself. “Wait here a minute,” he said. “Close your eyes.” Then he went into his room. I heard the drawer in the desk scrape open. Then he was back. “Put out your hand. Sophie gave me this. I want you to have it.” He dropped something small onto my open palm. I opened my eyes. It was a red, star-shaped pin with a photograph in the middle of a boy with curly blond hair.