My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  A pair of orderlies arrived to take Ilya down for the tests. I squeezed his hand hard, but he didn’t open his eyes. I sat next to Nance Olmstead on one of the wooden benches in the hall. She handed me a fresh tissue to replace the doctor’s. Then she began talking to me about little things, the cold spring they’d been having back home, what the stock market had been doing to our college’s endowment, what that meant for the possibility of a pay raise this year for her or for me. At first I didn’t want to hear it, any more than I wanted to watch another silent movie. After Mosjoukine, it might be years before I wanted to watch a movie at all.

  All I wanted was to hear the bad news about Ilya and deal with it. But little by little, I found myself drawn in by what Nance was saying. Were there likely to be budget cuts? What programs might find themselves sacrificed for the greater good? I found myself thinking of Gwen, chair of my department, my old friend. I knew how worried she must be, and suddenly I wanted to talk to her, to hear what plans she had for protecting the program we’d worked so hard to build. But I knew what Nance was doing. Stitch by stitch, word by word, she was trying to sew me back into the fabric of my old life.

  I twisted on the bench, trying to get comfortable as Nance talked. I was sore from the day before in places I hadn’t noticed until now. My breasts were tender to the touch, swollen. I cupped my palm around my right one, which felt nearly twice its usual size, odd considering how much weight I’d lost. I must have said my thoughts out loud—which was getting to be a bad habit—because I noticed that Nance had stopped talking and was staring at me.

  “When was your last period?” she asked.

  “My what?” Not getting her point, until I did. My periods had always been irregular. I certainly hadn’t had one since I’d been traveling so light—to New York, Paris, Moscow, back to Paris. I remembered Ben, our last night in bed. We’d had, as the phrase went, unprotected sex, but we’d been having unprotected sex for eight years, ever since Julia had been born. We’d hoped for a second child, but nothing ever happened. It was absurd to think I was pregnant now. Grief and jet lag had sent my hormones into hyperdrive. It was true I couldn’t seem to stop crying. Even Nance’s fresh tissue was soaked.

  Nance got up, then a minute later she was back with a red-haired female doctor, one too young to have known Ilya’s wife Barbara when she practiced at St-Louis. The doctor looked me over from head to toe. She was wearing orange Birkenstocks with her white lab coat. Her name tag read Dr. Moreau, a name blessedly free of any obvious ironic meanings. I thought maybe she would ask me to pee in a little cup, send that down to the lab to see if I was pregnant, but instead she led me down a flight of stairs and into an examining room. “Should I get undressed?” I asked.

  Dr. Moreau shook her head. “It’s not necessary. Just lie down and pull up your sweater.” She clicked on the monitor next to the examining table, then squirted cold gel onto my bare stomach. She rolled an ultrasound wand around on my belly, the ball tracking across my gooseflesh. Then there, on the little black-and-white screen by my side, were two small, nearly translucent fish. One moved, as if it had been tickled, then the other one wriggled, too.

  “Do twins run in your family?” Dr. Moreau asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, they do.”

  She clicked the wand, and the babies’ measurements appeared on the screen. “I’d guess the date of conception at March 1.” She looked at me. I nodded. “Though it’s hard to say with twins. They’re always smaller. It could have been earlier. March 1 makes the due date December 1, but twins are often born early.” She lifted the wand. “If you are going to have them. At your age, there are risks.”

  I knew what she was asking. Could I manage a double pregnancy at forty-two when I had been taking no kind of care of myself? What if they were born as tiny and ill as Anne-Sophie? I knew medicine had made progress in keeping premature babies alive, helping them grow into better lives than the one Anne-Sophie had lived. But there were no guarantees. I would be having these babies alone. Ben was gone, and Ilya would be gone, too.

  Never be afraid, my father and brother had said to me. This time I didn’t need to be told. I was not afraid, though maybe I should have been. I wanted the babies. No matter what happened, I wanted to be a mother again. I wanted to have something of Ben, of Mosjoukine and Sophie. I wanted to be part of a family again, one that did not end with me. I told her I wanted to carry the twins. I told her I wanted them to be born healthy.

  “Then we’ll make sure they are,” Dr. Moreau said, helping me off the table. “You Americans worry too much. Drink a glass of red wine a day, and all three of you will be fine.”

  22

  I went upstairs to join nance on the bench. “Twins,” I said and watched her lips form a perfect O. It took her a couple of tries before any sound came out.

  “Oh, my.” She looked at me with her eyes slightly narrowed, as if measuring me. “Are you sure you want more children? Are you ready to go through it all again?”

  I surprised myself. I smiled at her. I beamed. I laughed out loud. “You bet,” I said, one midwesterner to another.

  She smiled, too. Everyone would help, she said. I could teach part of the fall, then go on maternity leave. Maybe I still had some of Julia’s baby things—a crib? A high chair? If not, people would lend things. She and Tricia would throw a baby shower.

  I let her talk. I imagined my house set up for a new family. My old life retrofitted to make room for two new lives.

  “Then, in the spring …” Nance stopped in midsentence, looked at me. “You aren’t coming back to Indiana, are you?”

  She was quicker than I was. I thought of Mosjoukine’s apartment, the big bed where I had spent my first hours with my mother and my twin. I thought of the Place Ste-Odile. “No,” I said. “I’m not.” It wasn’t until I heard myself say it that I knew it was true. I had a new life. Or I would soon build one. In France. With or without Ilya, I had my old life, my first life, back. I’d been born in Paris, and my twins would be born here, too.

  Nance looked like she might cry. “Damn,” she said. The twins were her tightrope to the future as well, a thin strand of hope over that bottomless well of grief we both had only begun to cross.

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “You can visit. As often as you’d like.”

  She nodded. “Well,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, “the French have wonderful prenatal care. They’re still trying to make up for all those people they lost in the war.”

  I laughed again. Practical Nance. But she was right to count the blessings of free medical care. I had to feed and clothe my soon-to-be children. There was Ben’s life insurance. I could sell the house. We would be okay. If Ilya could make his way in Paris, so could we.

  Ilya’s gurney appeared at the end of the hall and rolled past us into his room captained by a single orderly this time. I followed them in and waited until Ilya was back in his bed, sheets tucked carefully around the tubes.

  He was awake, his eyes bright, maybe with the pain starting to cut through the morphine, maybe just bright and blue the way only Ilya’s could be. “The doctor will be in with the results from the tests,” the orderly said to Ilya, giving the sheets a last pat. Ilya didn’t answer, in no hurry to hear the bad news.

  As soon as the orderly left, Ilya pulled down his oxygen mask. It hissed faintly around his neck. “I’m sorry if I said anything crazy before.”

  I took his hand. “Nothing crazier than usual, brother.” I was still smiling. I couldn’t help myself.

  “You’re the one grinning like a fool,” he said.

  “I’m pregnant. With twins.”

  Ilya laughed, a quick shout of complete surprise and joy. In spite of the tubing, he managed to grab me and give me—and the twins—a fiercely hard hug. Even now, even after all he had gone through, he was stronger than I was. “You see?” he said, letting me go. “You were looking in the wrong direction. I told you life is about looking forward.” He grimace
d and leaned back in the bed.

  “If I hadn’t looked behind me, I wouldn’t have found you.”

  Ilya made a sour face that said clearly, Look what that got you.

  Before I could answer, the door opened. As soon as I saw Dr. Bonheur’s face, I knew what the news would be. His name had been a good omen after all. “All clear,” he said, holding up an X-ray in one hand. “Not a sign of a mass or a shadow. Nothing. Nothing! No cancer.” He slapped Ilya on the knee with the sheet of film. “You just have to learn to take care of yourself. No smoking. Honest hours.”

  It wasn’t L’Angoissante Aventure—death nothing but a dream. Ben and Julia did not spring back to life. The colonel and Livvy, Sophie and Anne-Sophie stayed dead. But my brother, my twin brother, would live.

  “We’ll keep you at least a week, though,” Dr. Bonheur said to Ilya. “Maybe ten days to make sure the antibiotics do their job.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Then at a loss for words, I repeated myself, shaking Dr. Bonheur’s hand, wringing it really. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “Sometimes we get a good outcome.” Dr. Bonheur nodded. “That’s important to remember.” He took his hand back. “I should say good-bye, then. There will be another doctor in charge of your case. I am taking,” he paused, as if searching for the right words, “a voluntary medical leave.” He frowned, and I could see his hands were shaking slightly. I had a flash of his finding the neighbor’s house empty, of morphine suddenly difficult to find. Dr. Bonheur shrugged. “Inevitable,” he said. “Best to face the future.”

  “Yes,” I said, “the future,” hoping his, too, would turn out well. Dr. Bonheur took Ilya’s hand and shook it. For the first time, I noticed how still Ilya was, his eyes round as pennies. He looked shocked.

  “How do you feel?” I asked him.

  “Like the hangman dropped me from the gibbet at Montfaucon and the rope broke,” he said. “The rope broke, and I fell two stories and landed on my feet like a cat.”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Bonheur said. “Now stay off the gallows.” He bowed slightly, then left the room and, as it turned out, our lives.

  I sat on the edge of Ilya’s bed. I felt dizzy with our change in fortune. I worried it might all somehow come undone. “What are you thinking?” I asked. The oxygen mask still hung around his neck. His eyes were serious, his mouth neither smiling nor frowning,

  “I was thinking,” he said, then paused. “I was thinking that as much as I hate to admit it, Mosjoukine was right. We might live to be 100, you and I.”

  “With his genes?” I said. “At least 110.”

  I touched Ilya’s hair, damp and tangled on his pillow. He was real, his skin and hair too sticky and dank to be part of any ethereal dream. I poked him gently. “You smell terrible, you know,” I said.

  “If I were dead,” Ilya said, “I’d smell much worse.”

  It was evening by the time I left Ilya and took Nance with me to 44 Place Ste-Odile. My guess had been right. The neighbor’s house was deserted, her lights off, her curtains drawn tight. Maybe after Ilya’s failed suicide, the police had visited her. More likely, she’d decided to take a little voluntary vacation until things calmed down in the Place Ste-Odile. As I put the key in the lock, I found proof the neighbor had been there since I’d seen her last. On the doorstep were my boots, stuffed with crumpled newspapers to hold their shape. An apology? Penance? A refund? I shook my head and took them inside with us.

  Nance was impressed by the furniture. Back home, she collected antiques. Looking around, I felt no attachment to the couch or piano. A kingdom of thing-dom, the colonel would have said. Only the people who lived here, had lived here, were important. I thought of my parents’ apartment. The house I had left behind. People died and left rooms full of tables and sofas and empty, empty beds. The point of this apartment, of Paris, was who was here and who would be here soon. I went into Ilya’s room, looked at the two pictures on the corkboard. Ilya happy, Ilya sad. I was glad the one with him smiling was pinned on top, even if Barbara at his side was a foreshadowing of the dark things to come.

  During the day, I sat at the hospital with Ilya while he got well. He wanted me to teach him English. Ben’s children, he said, should grow up speaking English as well as French, and he wanted to learn along with them. I bought some children’s alphabet books, and we worked our way first through an ABC of fruits, apple, banana, cantaloupe, fairly useful vocabulary. Then one of animals, anteater, boa constrictor, capybara, which was a bit more esoteric, but Ilya was a quick study.

  Nance hovered like a hummingbird, nervously going back and forth between the hospital, the Hôtel Batignolles, and the apartment, unable to bring herself to leave quite yet. She solved the mystery of who owned the apartment at 44 Place Ste-Odile. Her years of experience unraveling the problems of midwestern college students studying abroad had left her with no fear of the French bureaucracy. The answer was both simple and surprising. Ivan Desnos—Ilya—owned not just the apartment but the whole house. Mosjoukine had transferred it into Ilya’s name before leaving for Prague in search of Sophie, maybe foreseeing how that journey would end. When I told Ilya, for once he was speechless.

  In the paperwork was an answer to a second question: how first Mosjoukine, then Ilya kept the house without ever paying a penny of tax on it. Apparently my father, the colonel, had set up a trust to take care of those before he left Paris. Whether he had done it as a parting gift or payment for his friend and fellow spy Mosjoukine or as a legacy for Ilya, the boy he had not taken to America when he took me, I could never know. Any way you looked at it, 44 Place Ste-Odile was a gift, a double gift from two fathers to two children. Now it would house a third generation as well.

  Nance even tracked down copies of Ilya’s and my birth certificates, listing Sophie as our mother, but our father as unknown—Mosjoukine a fact Sophie had kept to herself. Nance used that document to persuade the police I would be no danger if I stayed in Paris under the watchful eye of my brother.

  On the day before Ilya was to be released, he sent me home early to nap, invoking the health of the twins. Coming in, I found Nance sitting in the kitchen drinking vodka with the air of someone who had been drinking a lot lately, as if that was what she did alone all night at the Hôtel Batignolles. I remembered that first awful night after Ben and Julia were killed and the night I’d spent drinking with Apolline. Pain cries out for anesthetic. Ilya could have told her that.

  I put my hand over Nance’s squat glass with its grudging French portion of ice before she could empty more vodka in it. “Don’t,” I said.

  Nance opened her mouth. Probably to tell me to mind my own damn beeswax. I guessed I was not the first one to ask her to stop drinking. But I wasn’t just anyone, not anymore. “Okay,” she said. She let go of the glass and handed me the bottle.

  We ate dinner together at Ilya’s kitchen table. It was my turn to listen. Nance talked about Josh, her son, how she hadn’t had a moment’s hesitation handing him the keys to her brand-new Avalanche that last night. He’d never given her any reason to worry. He never played his music loud if she was in the house. He always kept his room neat, his clothes folded away. After he died, she’d found herself angry with him for having been so damned perfect up until that awful night. If he’d been rebellious, if he’d been trouble, she could have steeled herself, prepared herself for bad news. She’d seen other parents do that, after the third arrest for drugs or disorderly conduct. They kept their muscles tight, always ready for the sucker punch. She’d been so unprepared.

  Even more urgently, she’d had the sad sick feeling that, in trying to please her, his overworked single mom, he’d missed out on life. On sex maybe, on wild dancing at all-night parties, on the exhilaration of swimming naked—God knows what else. Missed out on so many things he would never get to do. He did one bad thing, one stupid thing, and he paid such a high price—his life, two other lives. It was goddamned unfair.

  I agreed. It was all damned unfair. We stayed u
p nearly all night talking. She left for home the next day. I stood in the Place Ste-Odile and hugged her like we might never see each other again, though that turned out not to be true.

  Later that afternoon, I brought Ilya home in a cab. He was still too weak for even the short walk from the hospital. After he was settled in his room, he asked me to go to the boat and tell Jacques and Nolo what had happened. Then, two weeks later, when Ilya was well enough, the four of us went to the cemetery where Anne-Sophie was buried. Jacques and Nolo had known Anne-Sophie and used to go with Ilya to visit her in the years before she was too fragile to be touched. We stood looking at the little temporary metal marker on her grave. Ilya stepped over the low iron fence, went down on his knees on her grave. This made Nolo very nervous. He looked around for irate nuns. Jacques had brought flowers and handed them to Ilya to arrange at the foot of the marker.

  Ilya had laughed when I told him how close I felt my dead were, but he pressed his palm to the soft earth over his daughter as if he was sure she knew he was there. Then he took two small white stones out of his pocket and handed one to me. We put them on top of Anne-Sophie’s grave marker, neither of us caring that as a good communist and an atheist, our Jewish mother would not have approved. Stones didn’t wither and blow away like flowers. They were beyond death, and so was Anne-Sophie.

  In July, Ilya and Nolo bought La Sirène from Jacques, who was ready to retire a second time. Ilya and Nolo took turns giving their spiels to the tourists, steering the boat. The neighbor’s house stayed empty. I hired workmen to fix up the empty apartments on the ground and attic floors. When the twins got larger and needed more room, we would move downstairs, give Ilya some space. Who knew when he might need it? No son of Mosjoukine was too old at forty-two to marry again, to have another daughter or a son. Meanwhile, I rented out the top floor apartment to a pair of interns from the hospital and paid our daily expenses out of their rent.