My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  Now, at night, it was damp and silent. The pavement was still wet from either the earlier rain or the shopkeepers’ last cleaning. I could smell cheese through the glass window of the closed shop on my right. I could smell the blood and hair of the horse butcher’s. I turned west off Lepic, and then I knew where I had been headed all along: the bridge over the Cemetière de Montmartre. The longest I had ever spent in Paris, the one time I’d considered it conceivable, maybe even possible, that I might stay there was when I’d been researching my novel. This was before I met my husband, right before I got my job teaching. I’d walked the streets of Paris and thought about nothing but my characters, two lovers, in Paris in 1929.

  I’d set part of the novel in the cemetery, which I found romantic. I was so stupid and young, I think I’d even found the idea of death romantic. Now I stood on the bridge, looking down at the white roofs of the tombs of that miniature city of the dead, and it seemed no time had passed. I could hear the cats below, the dozens who lived in the cemetery. They lived in rag nests their admirers built for them in the houses of the dead. The same people came to feed them every day. The toms howled, the females in heat answered. I heard the soft mews of the spring’s early kittens. I had written the novel, published it, and never written another. Never mind that I taught students to write. I had stopped. Why? Because I had married, had a child? Not really a good excuse in these latter days.

  I leaned over and smelled the rank ammonia scent of the cats, so alive below me. I stopped writing because I was afraid. I had always been afraid. If, as in Kean, genius came hand in hand with disorder, I would pass. I wanted a happy life. A good life. A safe life. I remembered hearing a story about Faulkner, about how when his daughter asked him why he had missed her birthday party, he told her no one even remembered if Shakespeare had a daughter.

  So cruel. Is that what art took? Where had Mosjoukine been when Anne-Sophie Desnos found out she was pregnant? Where was Mosjoukine when she gave me away to an American colonel to be raised on the other side of the cold Atlantic? I had given up writing in a bargain with God to protect my life, my family, my happiness and theirs. Then it turned out God was as unforgiving, as unfair, as the goddamn IRS. Better to be a girl on Pigalle. Better to be a cat rutting in a tomb. What are we but eating and fucking and pissing animals? I loved my daughter. I loved my husband. The cats below me were raucous with love. What difference did it make in the end? As I stood there, looking down, I realized I could feel warm pools in my boots by my toes. I had walked until my feet bled. I hadn’t even felt it.

  I made it back to the hotel. I kept patting the book of maps in my purse, thinking, Here is what I have to do. Here is my work for the night. In my room, under the flat light of the florescent tube, I opened the map and poured over the streets on either side of the Canal St-Martin, all of the way from the Seine to the old slaughterhouses at La Villette. I stared until my eyes stung, until I had rubbed the dark paint around my eyes into a blur that stretched from cheek to cheek, that matched the purple bruise rising between my eyes. The young taxi driver had been right; there was no Rue Ste-Odile.

  I took out the stolen bottle from the stolen suitcase, opened it, shook out two Percoset, and swallowed them dry. Then I thought about it and took one more. I fell asleep on the bed in my stolen clothes, my new boots still on my bloody feet.

  7

  I dreamed I was dying. I dreamed I was Vera Holodnaya. I had the Spanish influenza, and I was drowning inside my own body. Someone had propped me up on white pillows, but still I couldn’t breathe. A curtain moved in a soft breeze, in and out of the window, but the air was not there for me. I wanted to cry out, but when I opened my mouth, my scream was the scream in a silent movie, full of emotion, quiet as the grave. I awoke covered with sweat, shaking, ran to the bathroom and threw up, the white rice I’d eaten the night before floating like little islands in the water of the toilet.

  The sun was just coming up outside as I showered and brushed my teeth twice. I washed out my underwear and my bloody socks. The broken blisters on my feet were dry and hard, as if my thin skin were in a hurry to be calloused. In the mirror, my face looked whiter than rice, except for the bruise between my eyes, which was shading toward a yellowish green. I put some foundation on it, rubbing it gently over the tender skin, then did the rest of my face, trying to remember what the makeup artist had done, but also trying to go slightly less diva than the night before, not wanting to look so much like the girls on Pigalle. Putting my face on calmed me. War paint, my father had always called my mother’s heavy foundation, rouge, tubes of red lipstick.

  I took two of the three credit cards out of my wallet and tucked them inside the suitcase. Last night I hadn’t cared if I was robbed on Pigalle, but in the morning light, it seemed foolish to carry all of them with me and risk having to cut short my search if they were stolen. I tossed in my bottle of Valium to keep the Percoset company and away from me for now. I put the suitcase in the closet and went outside. The bar across from the hotel was already serving coffee. I ordered. I felt chilled, though the sun was up, the day heading for lovely. I shivered, my hands shook, and I had to lean low over the cup, holding it between both palms.

  It was Saturday. The bakery was open. The other shops would be raising their metal shutters soon. Since the Rue Ste-Odile wasn’t on the map I bought last night, I would just have to find an older map to see where it had been. Or find an even older taxi driver. Someone in Paris had to know. I thought of the book stalls along the Seine. They seemed a likely place to start. Failing that, I would just start walking through the neighborhoods on either side of the canal. Someone would know, I kept thinking as I drank my coffee. Someone had to know. This was Paris, not Brigadoon. Streets did not just disappear without some record. People were another story.

  I ordered another coffee. Standing at the bar, I could see the Hôtel Batignolles across the street and somehow, because of the plate glass window or the lighting, it seemed far away, like a slide in a magic lantern show. Who knew what I might find once I started looking for Sophie Desnos? Would I be back at the hotel that afternoon, that night? The idea that I didn’t know sent a small wave of panic up the back of my legs, but I resolutely ignored it. I paid for the coffees, then crossed the street and went into the lobby. The night clerk was just closing out, getting ready to head home.

  “Madame?” he said.

  “I have some business,” I said. “I may not be back every night. I might even be gone for a few days at a time. Will you charge the room to my card until I check out?”

  He woke his sleeping computer with one flick of his mouse, checking to make sure they had my credit card number. “Certainly, Madame. Do you have any idea how long you—” he paused, since what we were really talking about was an empty bed, left luggage, and not me—”will be staying with us?”

  I shook my head. “I may know tonight. Or so I hope.”

  He took his turn nodding. The day clerk came out from the office behind the counter, a cup of coffee in his hand. The night clerk finished entering my open reservation with a final tap of the computer keys. “It’s done, Madame,” he said. “Good luck with your business.”

  By the time I got to the Seine, the little book stalls along the quay were beginning to open. I strolled along, checking out the yellowing novels in French, the thumbed art books. I stopped at a stall on the parapet. A man with a long beard like Santa Claus, slightly yellowed around the cigarette he was smoking in place of St. Nicolas’s pipe, was just unlocking. The sign he had set up on the pavement read, Maps. Etchings.

  I asked him if he had any old copies of the Plan de Paris par Arrondissement. He flung back the cover on his stall, revealing an entire row. “How old?” he asked, pointing to the ragged and broken spines, “1914, 1929, 1946, 1960 …”

  I pointed at the 1960 edition. “That should do,” I said. Then just for old time’s sake I had him give me the 1929 edition as well. When I’d been researching my novel, I’d checked out a 1929 Paris Bae
deker from the library of the university where I was a graduate student and brought it to France with me, accumulating enough overdue fines to have bought it many times over, but good girl that I was, I’d returned it. Now I wanted those happy days researching my novel back.

  I paid Santa for the books and took them to the nearest bench. First, I flipped open the 1929 book. Just looking at the style of the print made me realize why Paris seemed so changed. Paris for me was the setting of my novel. How often had I walked the streets, even after the book was long done, and seen only things that would have been there in 1929? The old shops with the glass and gilt fronts, the posts that had once held gas lamps. Paris in 1929 was, in some odd but real way, my Paris. And I realized it had been Ivan Mosjoukine’s. My novel’s lovers could have seen his fine car sweep by on the street, might have gone to see his popular film serial House of Mystery in weekly installments. Some film of his, at any rate. But they hadn’t. It made me sad, as if I had missed my one chance to connect with my father, even if that connection was fictional. Hell, all of it still seemed fictional to me.

  I looked in the index, and there it was, plain as print, Rue Ste-Odile. I found the page. It was not right beside the canal, but rather four or five blocks east. It made a crooked dog leg between the Haussmann-style Boulevard de la Villette and the compound of the Hôpital St-Louis, which sprawled over several city blocks, nearly down to the canal. Off the Rue Ste-Odile ran a little dead end, the Place Ste-Odile. I took Sophie’s photograph out of my purse to look at the address again. The ink was smeared. I had thought it read Rue, but perhaps it was Pl, the abbreviation for Place. Maybe the address was 44 Place Ste-Odile.

  I opened the 1960 edition of the same map. The Rue Ste-Odile was gone, displaced by a large new building at the hospital and replaced by a straighter, wider road that ran from the boulevard to the canal. But part of the Place Ste-Odile was still there, a little bump on the straight road of progress.

  I opened the book of maps I’d bought last night. I found the hospital, but no Place Ste-Odile. Or was there? The road past the hospital still seemed to have a strange wart on one side, a bump that could have been a printer’s error, a spot of ink on the rough paper. It was not labeled. Did that mean the Place Ste-Odile was still there? I flipped to the Metro map in the back. The nearest stop was Goncourt.

  I put all three maps in my purse—as well equipped now as any time traveler—and walked to the station at the Hôtel de Ville. Hôtel de Ville to Goncourt was a short run, with no changes of line, and as I went underground, I found myself wishing the trip could be more difficult. If I did penance by descending the stairs to the platform on my knees, would God or the universe reward me with my mother or at least some sign of my mother at the other end of the journey?

  I came up into the sunlight at Goncourt and strolled down the wide Avenue Parmentier, which I vaguely thought was probably named after the same distinguished Frenchman as the potato dish. I tried to remember what, exactly, were Potatoes Parmentier? Did they have cream, or was that Potatoes Dauphin? My daughter would eat only plain mashed potatoes, but she was eight. She would grow into more adventurous tastes. I stopped. Except, of course, she wouldn’t. I took a deep breath.

  At the end of the avenue stood the enormous compound of the Hôpital St-Louis. Nurses and doctors moved down the sidewalk ahead of me, and I followed them, let them carry me along, past a hodge-podge of modern outer buildings through an archway into the central courtyard. I stopped, taken by surprise. It was a secret garden. There were large trees, dotted with buds, and thin spring patches of fenced grass. In the very center, a bed of tulips was beginning to open, a blood red heart. I turned in a complete circle, admiring the surrounding old buildings, the elegant brick and stone of their façades, their tall mullioned windows. Then I sat on a stone bench, got the 1960 map out of my purse, and oriented myself. This way, I said to no one but me. I pointed. It’s this way. A man in an expensive but wrinkled gray suit passed me as I sat there pointing east like a weather vane. He looked at me like he knew a crazy woman when he saw one. I looked at him and thought, He slept in his clothes. Was he a doctor? The relative of someone dangerously ill? He left the courtyard by one entrance. I left by another.

  I followed the map, but still I almost missed the Place Ste-Odile. The entrance was a narrow passage that ran under a brick arch between two large postwar apartment blocks. No wonder the taxi driver had no idea where to find it. It was barely wide enough for a motorcycle, let alone a car. It looked like the entrance to a yard behind the blocks of flats, someplace where the neighbors kept their garbage cans. I eyed the passageway. It was probably just the chemical illusion our brains create that even Americans have learned to call déjà vu, but I had the strong feeling I had been there before. As I stood on the street, the man I had seen in the hospital courtyard brushed by me. “Pardon me,” he said. Then he was gone as quick as a rabbit down a hole.

  I followed him through the arch. In the Place Ste-Odile, time had stood still. There was only a single narrow house on either side, each three stories high with attic windows in gables poking through cracked slate roofs. The abbreviated block ended in the blank back wall of a tall apartment block. The two surviving houses of Place Ste-Odile leaned toward each other, as if to hide whatever business went on in the narrow, paved court between. Neither was in good repair, the plaster on the masonry walls cracked, the eaves sagging. Neither had been painted recently enough to show any color other than smog gray. Were they condemned? Abandoned?

  I heard voices. The man from the hospital was talking quietly to a large, middle-aged woman wearing a faded housedress in front of the house on the right. She was sitting on an old wooden kitchen chair, scrubbing what looked like flowered curtains in a pan of soapy water balanced on a low stool. Her forearms were strong, muscled enough to remind me of Popeye. When she saw me, she glared. The man leaned forward and whispered in her ear. The house number, faded and barely legible, over her door read 43. Surely that meant the one opposite was 44 Place Ste-Odile, but it had no number that I could see.

  The man finished his business with the woman washing curtains and passed by me on his way out. “Pardon,” he said, for a second time. This time I could see he had a stethoscope in his suit pocket. What was a doctor from the hospital doing here? Did physicians in France still make house calls? He hadn’t stayed long with his patient. I glanced at the woman. She was still staring at me, her eyes steady and black. While I watched, she wrung her curtains like the neck of a chicken.

  I turned my back on her and examined what I hoped was Number 44. Next to the peeling front door of the house were three doorbells. Two of the tarnished name plates above them were blank, but the third had a barely legible name engraved on it: A. Meis. I laughed. It was hard not to take it as a joke, as in “Nobody here but us mice.” I dug the picture of Sophie out of my purse. 44 Pl. Ste-Odile. But there was no flat or floor number as part of the address.

  I rang all three bells and waited. Behind me, the woman stopped strangling her wash. I could feel her eyes on me. No one answered. I rang again. Was this building abandoned? The ground floor windows were shuttered, but I stood back, staring at the upper floors. One pane in the attic was broken. But heavy, red velvet curtains hung in the second floor windows. Faded, but velvet nonetheless.

  I heard a swish behind me as the woman put her curtains back in the tub. I turned. She didn’t look down or pretend she hadn’t been watching my every move. I crossed the narrow courtyard. “Good morning,” I said.

  She waited a moment before she answered, “Good morning.” She had an accent. Polish? Romanian? But it was buried under what sounded like a half century of Paris. I bent down to show her the address on the back of Sophie’s picture. She smelled strongly of onions and sweat.

  “Is that the building?” I asked.

  She studied the photograph, then the building in front of us. She shrugged, admitting it was the address. I turned the photograph over, pointed at my mother.

&nbs
p; “I’m looking for this woman. She’d be in her sixties now. Her name is Anne-Sophie Desnos.”

  The woman took the photograph, looked at it even more carefully than she had the address, her every movement slow, deliberate, colored with a certain hostility, as if I were just another boss in a long line of bosses asking her to work harder for less pay. Then she shrugged so slowly—her broad shoulders first rising, then falling—it was as if we were standing neck deep in thick winter mud instead of the clear sunlight of a spring morning. If she moved slowly enough, her gestures seemed to say, I would give up and go away, leave her alone. I was sure it was a tactic she used every day.

  I didn’t go away. I took back the photograph, then repeated the name, Anne-Sophie Desnos. I spelled it D-E-S-N-O-S, speaking almost as slowly as she would have.

  She made a clucking sound. “Desnos?” she asked.

  I nodded. Now we were getting somewhere.

  “I don’t know her,” she pointed at the picture of Sophie in my hand. “But there’s a guy who lives in that building.” She bent, picked her flowered curtains out of the washtub with one hand. “His last name is something like that. A Jew.”

  I looked up at the front apartment with the faded red curtains. “Is he there now?”

  She started another glacially slow shrug, then seemed to give up on lethargy as the best way to be rid of me. She slapped her curtains into the tub so hard that the water flew, splashing us both. She’d had enough. I won.

  “He’s working,” she said. “He’s a guide on one of the tour boats they run up the canal to the old slaughterhouses in La Villette they’ve turned into some park.” She made a puffing sound with her lips, as if dismissing the very idea of paying money to ride on a canal boat like so much meat.

  “Where can I find …” I started.