When the ground floor apartment was remodeled in August, I discovered what everyone living in Paris with a spare bed already knew. People came to visit. Nance came and then John and Tricia with their seven-month-old son. Aunt Z and Apolline each promised a visit at Christmas after the twins came. Children have a way of making family.
In October, there was a revival of Mosjoukine’s reputation as an actor, at least in the world of silent film scholars. John called to tell me the film scholar I’d visited in the Marais was working on a book about Mosjoukine’s French films. And a film festival in Italy screened a major retrospective. I didn’t hear about it until it was over, but I wondered if Mosjoukine wasn’t there, sitting in the dark in the audience, an old man in a wheelchair pushed by a pretty young woman who looked enough like him to be his daughter. And I thought, who knows if we have seen the last of him? After all, he knew where to find us, 44 Place Ste-Odile, Paris, France.
On November 20th, the twins, a boy and a girl, were born, unbelievably tiny compared to Julia, but healthy at five pounds and three ounces apiece. My future and my past. The boy was a pale blond with the calm, distant light blue eyes of a believer. My own little monk. The girl had dark curls like Sophie, but brilliant blue eyes like Mosjoukine or Ilya. The first time she looked at me, I thought, this one is fearless.
To Ilya, with only Anne-Sophie for comparison, the twins looked like giants. He sat on the edge of my hospital bed, looking down at his new niece and nephew tucked in safely at my sides. “What are you going to name them?” Ilya asked, touching his finger to his nephew’s tight fist. “Promise me not Vera or Ivan.”
“That would be pushing our luck,” I said. I nodded at my blond son, asleep and dreaming beside his darker sister. “This is Benjamin,” I said, giving my husband one more way to be remembered in the world. Then I pointed at my dark-haired daughter, “And Élodie.”
Ilya curled her pink fingers around his outstretched finger. “Why Élodie?”
“Because I’ve never known a living soul with that name,” I said. “So who knows what we can expect?”
Ilya laughed. When he first led me into Mosjoukine’s apartment, he’d whispered, Welcome to the past. Now he bent over the bed and whispered in the twins’ ears, “Welcome to the future!” Then, like the tour guide that he was, he flung his arms wide, pointing the way there—as if we had just stepped off La Sirène, as if the world were a pleasure park and we were in for the ride of our lives. As usual, my brother was right.
And three days later, when we brought the twins home, we found two shiny red bicycles, newly delivered, waiting by the door.
Author’s Note
Ivan mosjoukine is one of the greatest film actors of the silent era. Born in Penza, Russia, on September 26, 1889, Mosjoukine was the son of a patrician landowner. Educated in Moscow, where for two years he studied law, he returned to Penza to announce that he wanted to go on the stage. When his father protested and put him back on the train to Moscow, Mosjoukine got off at the first station and began his life as an actor.
Mosjoukine starred in comedies and dramas alike, but became famous for his explorations of psychological realism. Mosjoukine’s performances in The Queen of Spades and Father Sergius are among the finest in Russian silent cinema. After the revolution, Mosjoukine followed other Russian émigrés to France, where he created his most remarkable work as a director, the experimental film Le Brasier Ardent. He also starred in the classic films Kean, The Late Mathias Pascal, Michel Strogoff, and his last, most ambitious French silent picture, Casanova.
In 1926, Mosjoukine, with a Universal Studios contract in hand, sailed for Hollywood. Universal cast him in the leading role in Surrender, an adaptation of a stage standard about a Jewish girl and a Cossack who fall in love. The reviews were disastrous, and Mosjoukine returned to Europe to act in German productions. His last silent films were Manolescu and Der Weisse Teufel. Mosjoukine appeared in sound films, but roles for an actor with a heavy Russian accent were limited. He died from tuberculosis on January 18, 1939, in a hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, at the age of forty-nine. He was buried in a poor grave marked only by a wooden cross.
JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL was born in France and raised in Florida. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and memoirs including Brazil, winner of the Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Award; the poetry collection Cinema Muto, winner of the Crab Orchard Open Selection Award; The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; and the memoir Space about growing up near Cape Canaveral during the moon race. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 25