She waved her hand in the direction of the Seine, dismissing me at the same time. “They start at the Port de l’Arsenal. But don’t expect them to let you on for free.” She then rose, tub in hand, went inside, and shut the door behind her with an audible click of the lock.
I stood on her wet doorstep and consulted the map. She must have meant the long basin labeled as the Port de Plaisance de Paris Arsenal, which I took to be the first part of the Canal St-Martin as it left the Seine, though it was hard for me to be sure because the water disappeared at the Place de la Bastille. Then there was no sign of the canal again until nearly the hospital.
This time the trip was ridiculously difficult, transportation as stasis. Three separate Metro lines, changes at two of the biggest Metro stations, Republic and Bastille, long walks underground to transfer from line to line. I should have gone on foot, aboveground. I found myself running through the complicated tunnels at Bastille. I wasn’t sure why. I had no idea when the tour boats sailed or how I would find a man with a last name that sounded something like Sophie’s, one man among many on what might be one of many boats. Or what I would say to him when I did. But I was an American, just a harmless tourist. I could buy a ticket, get on a boat, then figure out some way to ask. I ran as if my flight were leaving in ten minutes, as if I had heard the last boarding call.
As it turned out, there was only one boat docked by the side of the Seine, a narrow wooden barge with a small pilot house. It was dark green with the name La Sirène painted in red and gold on one side. It had a short ramp running up to it. A banner hung from poles on the quay: “Guided Tours! The Canal St-Martin, 13 Euros!”
A queue of elderly women waited to board. From the back, they looked like the woman in the courtyard. Even from a distance they smelled nearly as strongly, as if they, too, did heavy housework day after day. They were uniformly short and heavy, dressed mostly in flowered dresses covered by knit sweaters, a concession to the morning chill, as were the scarves on their heads. As I came up behind them I caught the soft swoosh of Slavic vowels. Great, I thought, I was trying to slip inconspicuously into a tour group composed entirely of Polish grandmothers. The woman directly in front of me, who wore a thick string of amber beads around her throat, turned to stare. Then they all did, a long rank of round grandmotherly faces. The line stopped moving.
A man’s voice from somewhere beyond the head of the queue called cheerfully in French, “Hurry, my dear ladies, and please have your tickets ready. We’re running late, and we have thirteen locks to go through today.” The grandmothers murmured in Polish and stared at me. The line stayed perfectly still. The man started down the line. I could see the top of his head over the shorter, scarf-clad heads of the grandmothers. Then I could see him.
It was me. He was me, though he still had my blond curls, his hair worn in a long ponytail down his back. He stopped, his face as surprised as mine.
I had a twin.
“Vera!” he said. I thought for a moment he was calling me by Mosjoukine’s pet name for Sophie. Then for a crazy moment I thought he thought I was Vera Holodnaya. Then I realized my mother had named me Vera. Apolline had neglected to mention that or the matter of my brother.
Now my brother grabbed me by the shoulders, kissed me first on my left cheek, then on my right so hard I was sure I’d have bruises like bookends to set off the one between my eyes. “Here,” he handed me a torn ticket stub. “Get on the boat.” Then he headed back up the line, snatching tickets from each outstretched, arthritic Polish hand.
8
My brother was taller than I was. And he spoke much better French.
I noticed both these things once I was on the boat and settled between two buxom grandmothers. Otherwise the resemblance was unmistakable. That was why the whole line of Poles had been staring at me on the quay. Now I heard the grandmothers whispering, heard siostra, which I took for the Polish word for sister, maybe modified by the Polish word for twin.
La Sirène had a crew of two. The captain, an older Frenchman, started the engine. My brother unlooped the heavy lines from the quay and tossed them on board before jumping on himself. He was taller than I was by a good six inches. Close to five eleven, I guessed. He looked tall and thin in worn blue jeans and a long blue sweater the color of his eyes and mine. I also noticed he, unlike me, moved like Mosjoukine. Spontaneous—jumping up and over the bow without seeming to notice he was moving—and effortlessly graceful. His boat shoes made white blurs as they arched through the air.
Then he switched on the microphone and started the tour. “Hello, good morning, my lovely fellow sailors,” he began in French. Then he paused and said his greetings again in Polish, or maybe it was Russian mixed with a little Polish, smiling at the grandmothers so warmly I could see them all around me preen a little, blush, coo. “I am your guide for this trip through time and across Paris, up the historic Canal St-Martin. My name is Ilya Desnos and …”
Ilya. Ilya and Vera.
“We will be together three hours this morning, making our way the length of the canal, through all thirteen locks, until we reach the basin at La Villette, where you will have time to stroll and visit the gardens at the Parc de la Villette, then all of you—well, nearly all,” he glanced at me as he added this, “have tickets for the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie this afternoon, and your trip to the museum will be followed by a performance at the Cité de la Musique.” Ilya waved a hand toward the bow as the captain maneuvered La Sirène through the narrow opening of the canal. “Now we step back in time. We are a barge making our way from the Seine to La Villette when it was the busiest port in France and the slaughterhouse for all of Paris.” Again, he repeated himself in what seemed to be a working melange of Slavic languages, to judge by the whispered questions that went through the grandmothers when he finished with his translation and the delayed laughs his jokes often got. They hung on every word.
Ilya’s mouth had the tight corners I noticed around my mouth in the picture taken at my naturalization, although his, through years of French, had firmed into thin, deep lines that set off his frequent smiles for the grandmothers like parentheses.
We moved toward the iron mouth of the canal, that meeting of nature—the Seine—and artifice—the canal’s first lock. The Canal St-Martin was ready for us, opening even for such a slight cargo as one mixed-up American, two Frenchmen, and twenty Poles. We entered the first lock and sat at the bottom of what seemed like an empty concrete swimming pool as the metal gates swung shut behind us. The water began to rise, taking us with it. We inched very slowly up the concrete walls. When we reached the top, another man jumped in the boat, a young African with a shaved head and large gold earrings. “My regrets,” he said to Ilya, apologizing for being late. “I was helping my cousin.”
When the lock was full, the gates ahead opened. The African helped Ilya untie the lines that had held the boat steady, kept it from bouncing against the sides of the lock. The wind at our back off the river suddenly felt chill. It had taken a good fifteen minutes to rise from one level of the canal to the next. Thirteen locks, my brother had said.
It was so odd watching him, half like looking at myself, half like staring at a total stranger. Some of the gestures were so familiar. There, he stood listening to a question with one hand open as if to catch a ball, as if to let the words gather in his palm like rain from heaven. My daughter had teased me about that one. “Crazy Momma,” she said to me, “you think you can hear with your hand.”
Others reminded me painfully more of her. The way my brother tilted his head first to one side, then to the other, if one of the grandmothers asked a question he didn’t quite understand. The puzzled dog look, my husband had called that one, when our daughter listened to our instructions—clean your room, take a bath—with her blonde head tilted as if what we were saying was unintelligible.
My strongest feeling was that here was someone besides my daughter who looked like me. The two people who raised me had not. Aunt Z had been right
about that. The mystery was why I’d never seen it, never even guessed. Apolline had been trying to prove that point when she held Mosjoukine and Sophie’s pictures up to my face and made me look in the mirror. But Ilya was the mirror.
He was talking again, giving the universal Slavic rendition of what we were seeing. The grandmother sitting beside me patted my knee and offered me a cough drop. I shook my head. “He’s good,” she said. Her French was better than mine. She felt no need to listen to the translation of what we’d just heard. I nodded, proud of my brother. “We’ve had a lot of guides. They take us here. They take us there. Yesterday to Notre Dame and then to the Mémorial de la Déportation. Have you been there?”
“Yes,” I said. My husband, daughter, and I had visited that splinter of the past buried in the tender tip of the Île de la Cité. I remembered my daughter staring at the illuminated crystals—numerous beyond even a grown-up’s ability to count them—that represented those deported from France to the camps, all the Parisians who never returned.
The Polish grandmother shook her head. “Interesting, I suppose,” she said, “but nothing to do with me.”
I looked at her. Nothing to do with her? I wanted to whisper the word Auschwitz in her ear, but then I remembered how tired and impatient I had been at the memorial after having already waited so long with my daughter in Notre Dame for my husband to finish climbing the bell tower. Standing right in the dark heart of the memorial, I’d asked my daughter if she would like to get some ice cream. Would I feel differently now that I knew my mother was French, possibly a French Jew? I hoped so. Then my own sorrow would have taught me something. Then again, I hoped not. What did it say if I only cared about the deported, the dead, if they were related to me?
We moved through a wide open stretch of the canal. Up ahead, I saw the stone arch of a tunnel where I had seen the canal disappear from the map at the Place de la Bastille. “That great planner and architect Haussmann,” Ilya was saying, “that perfect expression of his emperor’s will, covered the canal, stinking as it was with commerce, smelling too clearly of what made Paris all her money, to build yet another grand boulevard.” We all watched as the mouth of the tunnel approached and swallowed us whole. Then we were inside where it was so dark all of us blinked, and several women let out small startled cries of alarm.
Ilya’s voice echoed through the dim, chill air. “Haussmann put the work of the city—and its working class—out of sight beneath the sidewalks of the bourgeoisie. But Haussmann, Kind Dictator of the New Paris, also built skylights, barred portholes, to let air and light into the tunnel and hid them in the parks of his new aboveground world.” Ilya waved an arm above his head just as we passed under the first skylight. Green vines trailed down through the opening to meet us. We moved forward through the circles of wavering sunlight that Haussmann had granted us. The reflected lights bounced off the walls, shivering as if they, too, were cold. “Ghosts,” Ilya said in a stage whisper, pointing at the apparitions cast up on the walls. “Poor dead,” he said, “they didn’t want to leave their Paris.”
In the gloom, I saw a rat run along the tunnel’s narrow tow path, his eyes as bright as bits of sky in what began, as we moved slowly along, to seem like a daylong darkness. I imagined being born as this dark and this uncertain. Not to mention sickness, the soft sibilance of death. I imagined my daughter on the barge, along for this ride.
Just then, from the front of the barge came the eerie swoop of a violin. The Gavotte in G Minor by Bach. My daughter had played that piece in her second year of violin lessons. I leaned forward, trying to see where the music was coming from. It wasn’t her ghost. It was Ilya, standing on the bow, one foot resting on the tall coil of ropes he and the African used to tie off the boat each time we entered a lock. My brother drew the bow across the strings with a flourish. To be honest, my daughter would have found his technique both flamboyant and spotty.
The grandmother next to me poked me with her thick, sweater-clad elbow. “I told you he was good,” she said, nodding her head. Then she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, predicting the tips the violin solo would win him and nodded again. “A real pro.” An actor, I thought, from a line of actors. But not me. Even in my classroom, I was more a good listener, a quiet and careful lecturer, than the kind of performer that had students lining up for the chance to take one of my classes. Ilya would pack them in.
The melody ended just as we emerged into the light, leaving the tunnel behind us and passing beneath what my brother announced was the Swing Bridge of the Barn of the Beautiful, which stood above the lock of the same amazing name. In the sun, we blinked at the horse chestnuts and at the pedestrians who lined the bridge above us—one per step—as if posing for a group photograph, as if they were a choir assembling to welcome us to life or, at least, to their forgotten piece of Paris. In the sudden sun, my brother looked older, nearly as tired and thin as I was. He stopped his Slavic translation for a moment, coughing, then began again, explaining to the grandmothers about the swing bridge.
“Do you have children?” the grandmother asked.
“Yes,” I said, then, “no.”
She didn’t seem to be listening. “Because there is a children’s museum, La Cité des Enfants, at La Villette, too. It’s supposed to be wonderful.” She handed me a brochure she had for La Villette, for all the attractions at this abattoir turned pleasure park. “I wish I had one of my grandchildren with me so I could go.” She sighed. “I think I would like this more than the science museum,” and she pointed to the picture of small children wearing construction helmets, building a wall with oversized blocks of foam. She sighed more heavily. “Or the concert of experimental music.” I glanced at the brochure. Beside La Cité des Enfants there was a huge metal slide shaped like a dragon. I closed the brochure. I had no children. None. I had to remember that, and I wasn’t a child.
We passed the Hôtel du Nord which, Ilya informed us, had been made famous by the Marcel Carné film of the same name starring Arletty, who, when accused of having sex with a German officer, replied, “My heart is French, but my ass is international.” The grandmothers chuckled. I recognized the quay in front of the hotel from the photograph of Apolline and Sophie together by the canal.
We passed the Hôpital St-Louis, me for the second time that day. “The hospital was built to care for the plague victims of Paris,” my brother told us, then added that it had a famous medical museum of skin diseases started by a Dr. Alfred Baker in 1865. The doctor had commissioned an artist to make wax moldings of various diseases, thinking them more useful to the students than the usual drawings. The collection had been used for teaching until the 1960s and was still open to the public. Among other things, Ilya told us, the museum featured over six hundred casts of sexual organs deformed by syphilis and gonorrhea. The grandmothers loved this one. They blushed as red as if they were sitting on radiators instead of cold wooden benches.
Then the locks began to blur, the slow swooshing rise of water, the sound of time flowing by. The Polish grandmothers began to nod, chin on cushioned chin, until we reached the Lock of the Dead, which brought us all, even the oldest, briskly back to life. Ilya explained this was the site of the Gibbet of Montfaucon, mont for mount, a site so high all Paris could see who was executed here, hanged from sixteen ropes on two levels so the hangman could drop thirty-two into the next world at one time.
“Even in death,” he said, “the aristocrats were up on top and so had the better view of Paris. Imagine,” he whispered, “the ravens pecking out the eyes first. Corpses left to hang for weeks. In the foreground, perhaps a pile of freshly quartered pieces from the guilty executed in the city center.”
Then he waved a hand. “Thinking of having lunch?” he asked, with a wicked smile. “Let me recommend a restaurant.”
Finally, we rose inside the thirteenth lock and sailed at last out of the Canal St-Martin into the basin at La Villette. If this trip had been birth, then we were born. If death, then wherever the dead go, w
e had arrived.
In the distance, I spotted the slide shaped like a dragon. The Polish grandmothers crowded around Ilya, most pressing tips into his hand, many kissing him on one or both cheeks. Then they disembarked, headed toward the promise of a garden.
My brother helped the last grandmother down the ramp, then jumped back on board to grab his violin case and a rucksack. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some lunch. Then we can talk.” He put out his hand, and I took it. It was the same shape as mine, fair, freckled, though his was warm and mine felt, even to me, like cold meat.
He led me down the concrete path into the park. It was an odd place, with long raised walkways covered by metal roofs like waves. What I assumed was the Cité des Sciences was an enormous blue glass fortress built on the stone foundation of one of the old slaughterhouses. Red stumpy pylons of varying heights—art? lights?—were spaced with monotonous regularity across the flat, open grass. Like the shopping mall that had taken the place of the old open air market at Les Halles, this abattoir turned space-age park seemed like a vision of a future that had never come true. Now it had a run-down, deserted air. More traditional amusements had moved in, an attempt to make the vast scale more human. We passed an ice cream stand, another with sandwiches and fries, cold drinks.
There was a carousel, this one apparently made of animals rescued from a century of carnivals. As we passed, a faded wooden rooster winked his one glass eye at a donkey who nodded his broken head but failed to catch a speed boat that rose and fell, always just ahead. Only two children were riding. A girl a little older than my daughter, maybe eleven, too big for her poor earless pig, and a boy, maybe four, a tiny Patton in his green tank. He aimed the tank’s gun at a tin horse that had already lost a leg. What was one limb in a place like La Villette, butcher for all of Paris, La Villette, the Verdun of animals. The grass glowed a bright cemetery green.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 9
