Apolline leaned forward and tapped one finger on the front of the postcard. It was a hand-tinted photograph of a man in a dark suit, wearing an immaculately knotted silk tie. His hair was combed straight back, and his bright blue eyes were looking directly at the camera, past the camera, with an expression so intense I felt it. He looked like a movie star. A caption was printed at the bottom of the card. Film Albatross.
“My God,” I said. “This is Ivan Mosjoukine.”
“You know who he is?” Apolline said. “How do you know that? No one knows who he is anymore.”
“My husband,” I started, then stopped. It seemed too complicated to explain to Apolline what my husband had done for a living, that he watched and wrote about old films no one else had any desire to see, that his passion had pulled us all into his world, our daughter growing up watching Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, our family vacations spent near film archives where he was doing research or attending silent film festivals. “He liked old movies,” I said, and let it go at that. I knew who Mosjoukine was because my husband had thought about writing an article on Albatross, a film company formed in Paris by White Russians who’d fled the revolution. Mosjoukine, who’d already been a success in Russia, had been their biggest star.
We’d watched the only Mosjoukine movie my husband was able to get his hands on, Kean: Disorder and Genius, a bio pic about the great English Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean. The film was famous among film scholars, if little watched, for a furious fast cutting scene where Mosjoukine as Kean dances, Cossack style, in a pub. He dances and drinks and dances again, fueled by his impossible love for the wife of an ambassador from somewhere—Norway? Venice? A woman who was also the mistress of the Prince of Wales.
In the end, Kean, the most popular actor in England, defies the Prince of Wales and is booed from the stage. He dies, abandoned by his public, nearly alone and in poverty in a famous deathbed scene. A very long deathbed scene. One where he quotes Hamlet.
My husband had found Kean slow and sentimental. I had been stunned. Mosjoukine, I thought, was amazing. I’d felt every stab, every turn of love or jealousy. Even in the fuzzy bootleg print we saw, he burned on the screen. I made my husband run the film again. Maybe my enthusiasm was one reason he dropped the project. “Next time we’re in Paris,” he’d said, putting off the project in the name of all the research it would take at the Cinémathèque Française, where they had the rest of Mosjoukine’s French films.
“He’s my father? Ivan Mosjoukine, the silent film star, is my father?” This seemed absurd.
Apolline nodded. “He was crazy about Sophie. He said she reminded him of some Russian actress, Vera Holo-something. He called Sophie his little Vera.”
“Vera Holodnaya,” I said, naming the Russian silent film actress who had died young of Spanish influenza, right after the revolution. When she died, thousands upon thousands had turned out in Odessa for her funeral. The scene rivaled the riot in New York after Rudolph Valentino died. Now she was even more obscure than Mosjoukine, her films nearly all lost, but she had a small devoted following as a doomed film diva, as someone whose fate had been as tragic in life as in film. I looked back at the picture of Sophie by the canal. Dark hair, darker eyes. Vera Holodnaya.
Then I remembered that Mosjoukine, too, had died young. Hadn’t he? Although he’d survived to leave Russia after the revolution and, in doing so, clearly outlived Vera Holodnaya. I thought I remembered a sad death after sound came to film, when he was already broke, already forgotten. That was the great cliché about silent film actors, that sound killed them all in the end. It was a legend that lived on in Gloria Swanson’s role as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, fading away in her grand mansion, waiting for one last great role, calling out as the police take her away for murdering William Holden, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. De Mille.” But just because it was a cliché didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Or was I just remembering the crushingly sad end of Kean?
“You think I am making this up,” Apolline said.
“Well,” I said, “it is hard to believe.”
For the second time in as many days, someone took my face in their hands and made me look in the mirror. Know thyself. Apolline held the picture of Mosjoukine up beside mine. Blue eyes. His sharper than mine, more focused. Then she held up the snapshot of Sophie, the skin around her dark eyes black as kohl. Silent movie eyes times two.
4
I went into apolline’s bedroom and called the chair of my husband’s department, another film scholar who was an old friend. In my husband’s office at home in Indiana were a half-dozen books I could have checked for information on even such a forgotten film figure as Ivan Mosjoukine, but that was there and I was here.
“John,” I said, when he picked up the phone.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Emma.”
I could hear people talking in the background, the sound of forks on china and glasses clinking. “Oh, you have guests.”
“To hell with them. Where are you? Tricia said she went by the house this afternoon looking for you. There was mail piled everywhere and no one answered the bell. She was about to call 911 when a neighbor came by walking her dog and told her she’d seen you leave in the airport shuttle this morning.”
Tricia was John’s most recent wife, a poet who taught in my department. A good one. Would she really have called 911? Yes, Tricia wrote whole books of poems about dying. She had a sestina about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge that made suicide sound like the best high dive ever. She knew enough about the magnetic pull of death to be worried about me. “I was taking my aunt to the airport,” I said.
“So you’re home now?”
“No, I’m in New York, but that doesn’t matter. Listen, I need you to look up some information for me. I need a bio for Ivan Mosjoukine.”
“Who?” John’s specialty was Japanese film.
“He’s a silent film actor from the ’20s.” I could hear John cover the phone with one hand and whisper something to someone. Tricia probably. I didn’t want this turning into an intervention.
“Pick up the other phone,” I could hear him mouthing to her. “Mojo … who? How do you spell that?”
I spelled Mosjoukine. “He was Russian,” I added. “So probably there is more than one way of transliterating it. I think I’ve seen it with a Z.”
“Give me a number,” John said. “I’ll call you right back.”
I heard Tricia pick up. “I’ll call you,” I said and hung up. Whatever Tricia wanted to tell me about John, her writing, their newborn son, her faith in the power of really good meds, whatever it was that kept her going day to day, I didn’t want to hear it. She still had her family.
I gave John a half hour, then I called back. This time, wherever he was, in his office in their attic probably, there was no extra noise. Also no Tricia.
“Can’t I fax or email this to you?” he asked.
I looked around Apolline’s apartment. As far as I could tell she didn’t have so much as an answering machine. Even her phone was a pink princess, the old-fashioned square push buttons yellow from use. I fished a pencil out of a coffee cup on the phone stand, got a pad of paper. “No,” I said. “Just go slow.”
“Well, get ready to write it down. Ivan Ilyich Mosjoukine, born Penza, Russia, 1889, the son of a prosperous landowner,” John read. “Sent to Moscow to study law, he skipped from the train at the first station and joined a traveling theater troupe. Went to Moscow and was a success on the stage.” John was summarizing now. “Started making movies in Russia in 1911. Played roles from Tolstoy, Pushkin. ‘Developed a style of psychological realism,’ says one place. ‘Was famous for burning, mesmeric eyes,’ says another.” John paused. “He became the biggest Russian star. Then came the revolution. He and his director, producer, other actors—do you want their names?”
“Not now,” I said.
“They fled to the Crimea, then on to Constantinople, and finally made their way to France. Formed a film compa
ny …”
“Albatross,” I said.
“Ill-omened name,” John said. “Yes, and Mosjoukine—by the way, that’s the French spelling. Do you have any idea how many ways you can spell it? Mosjukin, Mozzhukhin, Mozhukin, even Moskine. Then there is Ivan and Iwan and Jwan. Anyway, he was a nearly instant success in France as well. More praise. Jean Renoir said he decided to become a film maker after seeing Le Brasier Ardent, an experimental film Mosjoukine wrote, starred in, and directed. In 1924, Jean Tédesco wrote that while people used to say, ‘You should have seen Sarah Bernhardt die,’ after Kean, they say, ‘You have to see Mosjoukine die.’ Whew,” John said. “How come I never heard of this guy? He was in comedies. Someone here compares him to Chaplin. Also epics and period films, the Jules Verne historical drama Michel Strogoff. I read that as a kid. A version of Casanova that has some great stills here from Venice, and a film about the actor Edmund Kean. Want a complete filmography?”
I didn’t. What I wanted was to find out what happened in the end. When the end came. “No, what happens after sound?” I asked.
“Well, first there was other stuff. A contract in Hollywood. One movie made from an old Broadway chestnut about a shetel girl and a Cossack falling in love. He was Ivan Moskine over here. Disastrous reviews. Seems he just left. Went to Berlin. Made a series of movies there for European release. Those were successes, too, though maybe they don’t get quite as many glowing adjectives. At least in the bios I found. Then …”
“Sound,” I said.
“Sound,” he said. “To quote the British film historian David Robinson, Mosjoukine ‘approached sound films bravely, but the roles for an actor with a heavy and ineradicable—and it is sometimes said, unintelligible—Russian accent were clearly limited.’ Sounds like he’d been generous with his money when he had it. By the ‘30s he was broke. He drank. Says he died of tuberculosis alone in a hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine in January 1939 at age forty-nine. He was buried in a pauper’s grave.”
It was the death scene from Kean, but minus the faithful friend at his side, the last-minute appearance of the woman he loved. In a movie, it was heartbreaking. In real life, both sordid and sad. “Jesus,” John said. “It just plain sucks. I mean, how can you be so famous and then be so completely forgotten?”
“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s the line from Hamlet Mosjoukine recites when he’s dying at the end of Kean.”
“Guess he got that right,” John said.
Why was it, I wondered, Mosjoukine seemed to have known what was coming, or was that just an illusion I had looking backward, comparing Kean with the end of Mosjoukine’s own life?
“Emma,” John broke into my thoughts, his voice wrinkled with worry. “What is this all about? Isn’t there something else I can do? Something real?”
“No, no, John, but thanks. Give Tricia my love.” I hung up before he had a chance to ask me anything else.
Mosjoukine had died in 1939. I was born in 1958. Hard to father a child when you have been dead nineteen years.
I pointed this out to Apolline once I was back in the kitchen.
“He wasn’t dead,” she said. “Not when I knew him, anyway. Who are you going to believe? Me or some book?”
I shook my head. I was a professor. I tended to trust books. But I found myself thinking of the colleague in my department who was convinced that Christopher Marlowe, author of Dr. Faustus, had not died at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl from a knife through his right eye, but had been whisked away, hidden from his enemies, and gone on to write all the sonnets and plays we mistakenly thought had been written by William Shakespeare, a mere theater owner who acted as Marlowe’s front. Then again, my colleague was quite old and quite mad.
To quote John, he had died “alone.” In one of the sad, always unfashionable suburbs outside Paris. What if Mosjoukine had faked his death to escape debts, his failed career, to start over?
If he had lived—just if—how old would he have been when I was born? I did the math in my head. He would have been sixty-nine. Not young, but not dead. That part, at least, was plausible. John, for example, was sixty-five, and he and Tricia had a three-month-old son.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe he was alive. Maybe. Barely.”
Apolline snorted. “He was handsome,” she said. “Not some old man.”
“But Sophie must have been forty years younger than Mosjoukine,” I said.
Apolline rolled her eyes. “Sure, he had white hair, but when he was looking at you with those blue eyes of his, you forgot all that. And he had such lovely manners. Only men born before the first war had manners like that. Plus he was working for the Americans and had money like no French boy did. He even had a car. Sophie had nothing. No family. Less than me, and I had less than nothing. You don’t know, you can’t, what it was like growing up an orphan during the war, trying to live after. We never had a chance at school. Then grown, what were we supposed to do? It wasn’t just Sophie or me. In those days, none of the girls who worked at the bar had more than the clothes they went to work in, maybe an extra pair of stockings. Paris was dust. France down and out. No matter how hard de Gaulle beat the drums to make it sound as if we were a strong nation again.”
“So it was all about money?”
“No.” Apolline shrugged. “That’s making it too simple. Mosjoukine and Sophie, what can I say? When they were together, it was like watching a love scene in a movie. They just burned up the place. Even then it seemed crazy.” Looking back, she raised her shoulder, let it drop.
We had left the brandy behind and were working on a bottle of single malt Scotch that had a yellowing gift card from a client attached. Judging by the age of the card and the face Apolline made every time she took a sip, Scotch was not her favorite drink, but we both felt a strong need of it. Apolline sighed. “Mosjoukine had such beautiful clothes. Honestly, anyone would have gone to bed with him. Though he only had eyes for Sophie. Only your father”—she stopped herself—”only the colonel, in his American uniform, came anywhere close.”
I imagined the frantic bar scene from Kean, my father and Mosjoukine tossing back drinks, then arms linked with the men of the neighborhood, the French officers, dancing the sailor’s hornpipe until dawn. I laughed. The room spun, tipped, righted itself. I’d had a lot to drink on a stomach so empty I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.
“What?” Apolline said. “You are laughing at me?”
“No,” I said, putting my head down, half on the table, half on her arm. “I was just thinking of how long it’s been since I went dancing.” Apolline clucked her tongue and rested her free hand on my head.
The only trace of Sophie Desnos that Apolline had was an old address, 44 Rue Ste-Odile, which she said was not far from where they’d lived together off the Canal St-Martin. The address was written on the back of the first photograph of Sophie. After the colonel had taken her to Fontainebleau to help care for me, Apolline said, she’d tried to keep in touch, but she hadn’t written or heard from Sophie since she’d come to America in 1962, so the address was nearly forty years old.
“Forty years!” I said. I was sitting up again, though slanting badly in my chair. It seemed hopeless. “A forty-year-old address?”
“Who knows?” Apolline said. “In France people don’t move around like here. She could still be there. I’ve been in this apartment for nearly that long.”
Apolline had not seen Ivan Mosjoukine since he’d gone away—south, maybe to Nice, she thought—before Sophie even knew she was pregnant. As far as she knew, if Mosjoukine was my father, he had no idea he was. “Men slept with a lot of women then,” she said, “and women got pregnant. Not all the time, but not never like now.”
After we finished the Scotch, Apolline helped me from the table to her bed, and then she stretched out, fully clothed, on the other side. I had the spins and hung onto the blanket she’d put over me with both ha
nds.
“Did you ever sleep with my father?” I asked her. Apolline laughed.
“Which one? Mosjoukine? No. He was too pretty for me.”
“No, no, the colonel,” I said. She sighed.
“I wanted to. God knows, I wanted to. But he loved Livinia more than life,” she said. “God knows why. She tortured him. She was so jealous. Jealous of his job, of the people he worked with, of me. Of you.”
“Of me?”
“You never knew that?”
I shook my head, though that was a mistake. For a minute, I thought I might be sick.
“Ma pauvre enfant,” Apolline said, patting the blanket over me. “Sweet little fool.” Then she let out a deep breath, and before she could take another, she was snoring.
I lay awake in the dark of Queens, car alarms going off outside, thinking that Apolline was right. She should have been my mother. It would have been simpler.
I dreamed I was watching the one film I had seen with Vera Holodnaya, the Russian diva my mother was said to have resembled. I heard my husband’s voice lecturing me, See how close the director keeps the camera? Look, look at the light coming through that window. Only in the film, I also was Vera, playing a rich Russian girl filled with ennui, with a vague sense that life is more than her mother’s drawing room. I was Vera stabbing a man, killing him, and then fleeing back to the smothering safety of her mother’s house.
I was Vera, washing and washing my hands in a white porcelain sink. I felt a sharp stab of irritation at my husband, lecturing me on a rare early tracking shot. Why was he talking, talking, talking all through this silent film? I couldn’t even hear the music. What music was the pianist playing? So softly, too softly. Shut up, I snapped at my dead husband, the husband I loved.
Then I was awake, shaking so hard my teeth chattered. I made it the bathroom, hugging myself, still shivering, though I wasn’t cold. I inched the door shut, trying not to wake Apolline, snoring on the bed. I turned on the light, wincing at the sudden brightness and looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot. I was still good and drunk. I had no idea what time it was, except that it was dark. I washed my face.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 4
