My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  I shook my head. “Not a word. I didn’t even know I was adopted.” I watched as my brother added a little salad to our two plates, set them on the table. Then he got out forks, two mismatched glasses, and two bottles of red wine. He opened one bottle, poured some into the glasses, handed one to me. I hesitated, still feeling shaky.

  “Builds the blood,” he said. “Take it.” I took a sip. He took a long pull on his, then looked at me over his glass, his blue eyes so clearly Mosjoukine’s eyes. “Growing up in America,” he asked, “did you miss having a brother?”

  Had I? I’d been aware of being an only child, of my friends at school having to share rooms, having brothers and sisters to fight or play with. Had there been some indefinable sense of loss? When I was sad, when I cried at my naturalization or, later, hiding in the orange grove behind our house in Florida, what was it I felt was missing? Who was I missing? My real mother, real father, twin brother? God?

  “Eat,” Ilya said, waving his fork at my plate. “That wine won’t do you any good on an empty stomach.” I put a bite of omelet in my mouth, chewed, tried to swallow. It tasted as good as it smelled, but I seemed to have lost the knack of eating. “You don’t remember, do you?” Ilya asked. “How you came back here?”

  “Here?”

  “Your mother brought you back.”

  “Livinia?” I dropped my fork on my plate.

  Ilya nodded. “Livinia, if you say that was her name,” Ilya said. “She brought you back when you were almost three and left you downstairs with a neighbor. We found you when we came home from the market. You lived here with us for nearly the whole summer.” He waved his fork at the apartment. “Nothing looks familiar?”

  I thought about the passage into the courtyard, my sense of déjà vu. I looked at Ilya and tried to imagine him smaller. I remembered playing with a boy who my father had always told me was our neighbor in Fontainebleau. Rocks, I remembered playing with rocks. We collected buckets of pebbles to cook rock pies, to made muddy pots of rock stew.

  “Stone soup,” I said.

  Ilya smiled, the wrinkles on either side of his mouth cutting deep into his cheeks. “Ah,” he said, “even then I was the good cook. You,” he made a face, “were a bad one. Too much dirt in your bisque.” I took another bite of the omelet. I wasn’t eating much, but Ilya ate even less.

  “What happened after the summer?”

  “The colonel came and got you. He found out where you were. Maybe he’d been away on Army business. At any rate, I don’t think he had any idea how your mother discovered where we lived.”

  Apolline told her, I thought. It had to have been. She knew where Sophie was. Had she told Livvy for my sake, to reunite me with Sophie and Ilya? Or had she done it to hurt Livvy or the colonel? Had she done it to hurt Sophie? I’d been raised to think people’s motivations were direct and simple. Now it was hard to guess where this knot started or where it would end.

  Ilya refilled our glasses. “The colonel came looking for you, and when you saw him, you ran across the courtyard.” Ilya opened his arms wide. “Like this.”

  Then I remembered the sensation of running, the freshly dry-cleaned smell of my father’s uniform as he picked me up, spun me around. I thought I remembered leaving in his arms, not even looking back. Damn, both my mothers had given me away, Sophie twice. What kind of charmless child had I been? I would never have given up my daughter. Not for anything or anyone. From the moment I had first seen her in the delivery room, my heart burned with love. This is what the mother lion feels, I remembered thinking woozily. I would have killed to keep her safe, would have died. In the end, my love hadn’t been any protection. I put my hand to my stomach, remembering how it felt when she was still safe inside my body.

  Then I noticed Ilya. He was pushing the salad around on his plate. I put my hand on his blue sleeve. I had never seen a man look sadder, his eyes downcast. His face was pale. I had come to Paris to find family, to find someone who cared if I lived or died. Now, here was someone who had loved me and missed me. All these years and I had never even known.

  “You thought I should have stayed,” I said. “You thought I should have chosen you.”

  Ilya shrugged. “We were children. We didn’t make the decisions.” He got up and began to clear the table, piling the dishes in the sink. “Let’s go in the living room,” he said, grabbing the glasses and the bottles of wine.

  This time we sat on the floor in front of the baby grand, the glasses balanced on the thick rose-patterned carpet. He kicked off his boat shoes, but I kept on my boots. It wasn’t my apartment.

  “You grew up here, then, with Mosjoukine and Sophie?”

  He shook his head. “She wouldn’t let him back in his own apartment after the fight in the bar. He would come by, bring a little money, toys or candy for me. Once he brought me a red bicycle. But she wouldn’t let him any further than the stairs. Then, when I was three—the autumn after you went back to your other family—we left.”

  “Left for where?”

  “For Prague. Sophie believed Czechoslovakia had the best chance to become a true workers’ paradise. She thought Russia never would. It was too agrarian, too backward to be the perfect communist state. She wanted to live what she believed. It sounds crazy now, I know, but then …” He poured us more wine. “Okay, then it sounded crazy, too. She talked the Czech embassy into visas for us, packed our clothes, and off we went on the train. She didn’t tell anyone she was going. Mosjoukine would have killed her. He hated the communists, always went on about how Lenin had ruined the lives of his friends in the Russian film industry, how Stalin had killed his father, his whole family, along with millions of Russians before, during, and after the war. Your father would have tried to stop her, too, if he’d known, though maybe he was on his way back to America by then.

  “So I grew up a good communist. We lived in an apartment block with other foreigners, mostly from America, some from rich families who owned skyscrapers in New York. Such believers! They sacrificed everything to move there, so they had to see what they wanted to see. Our Czech neighbors used to throw things at us sometimes. Called us Jews.”

  “Was our mother Jewish?” I asked. I was lying on my back on the carpet, my head spinning. “Are we?”

  “Was she? Who knows. For Sophie, God didn’t exist. She had no religion but communism, and she wanted that ideology pure as snow.” Now Ilya was flat on the carpet, too, both of us gazing at the cracked plaster ceiling as if at the stars. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “When I was six, every day she took me to this store that sold pots and pans and dishes in our neighborhood in Prague. Every day, as we walked home from school, she would go in and ask if they had plates. My mother and I were sharing one plate and one bowl then, though we each had a fork. Every day, the clerks behind the counter would say, No, Comrade Desnos, no plates have come from the ceramics factory. Try again tomorrow. The shelves of the store were bare, no plates, no anything, except some enamel pots that were so badly made they blew apart like hand grenades when they got hot.

  “All along, of course, there were plates, but like everything worth having in Czechoslovakia, they were out of sight in the back room. To get them, you had to trade something: some meat from the butcher shop where you worked, a dental exam for one of the clerk’s children that didn’t overlook cavities the way the compulsory ones in the schools did. Everybody knew that. I was six, and even I knew it. Everyone knew except Sophie.

  “Finally, she wrote to the director of the factory. She demanded—in her very poor Czech—to know why his factory was not producing its quota of dishes for the workers of Prague. When would there be plates? The manager wrote back, thinking she was just crazy enough to report him and get him in trouble for not doing his job. He wrote her and said, Dear Comrade Desnos, the Proshuka Ceramic Works delivered twenty boxes of plates to Store Number 4 on the first of this month. This should have been more than enough dishes for the workers of your district. Yours, etc.

  “Sop
hie snatched me up by the hand and dragged me down the street to the store. I didn’t want to go. I knew there was going to be a scene, but she had me like death. She banged open the door and when the clerks started in with their usual Nothing today, Comrade, she waved the letter in their faces. They got scared. They opened the door to the storeroom and showed her the cartons of dishes. ‘Take as many as you want, Comrade Desnos,’ they said to her. They were afraid of her now, wanted to buy her off. But Sophie made the clerks carry all twenty boxes out and pile them on the counter.

  “She made me climb up and sit on top of them, just to make sure all twenty stayed there. Then she marched to the front door of the shop, threw it open, and shouted, ‘Women of Prague, we have plates!’ She stood there until the clerks had sold every plate and bowl at the marked price.” He laughed, then started coughing, hard, nearly choking. He sat up. I sat up, too, ready to pound on his back, but he poured himself more wine, took a sip, and was better. “Only then did we go home with our one new plate. To have more,” he sighed, “would have been bourgeois. Though I remember wishing we could at least have gotten a second bowl.”

  “When did you come back to Paris?” I asked.

  “In 1968, the Prague Spring, yes?” Yes, I nodded. I remembered watching the footage on the evening news with my parents. It had been a break from the endless coverage of the war in Vietnam, which my father, retired Army colonel or not, had bitterly opposed. He didn’t believe in fighting wars we couldn’t win, he’d told me. “One day I came home from school,” Ilya went on, “and there was a big car, a foreign car, like a diplomat might drive, and there, standing next to it, was Mosjoukine. He’d come to get us. He had all the paperwork and wanted us to leave that night. ‘The Soviets will come,’ he said to Sophie. ‘They won’t let this experiment go on. I know.’

  “‘Good,’ Mother said. She thought Dubcek’s reforms were heresy. She hated him. She was a Stalinist to the core. ‘When the Red Army comes, I’ll be in the street cheering them.’ He said she was blind. She said he was a class enemy. Things like that. Worse. He was cursing her in Russian. She was cursing him in French and Czech.”

  Ilya said he’d fallen asleep listening to them fight, then woke up when Mosjoukine picked him up off the floor. “Shhh,” Mosjoukine had said, carrying him to the car. They crossed the border just before midnight. By the end of the next day, Ilya was back in France. Two days later, the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. No more spring. Ilya said he had seen our mother on French TV waving the hammer and sickle.

  Mosjoukine brought him back to the apartment at 44 Place Ste-Odile, and they’d stayed there together for three years, until Ilya was nearly thirteen. Then Ilya had gotten very sick. Spinal meningitis. The doctors thought maybe he would die, or go blind, or be left brain damaged. They thought anything might happen. He kept crying out “Mother!” and one of the doctors asked Mosjoukine if there wasn’t anything he could do to bring her to the hospital to see her son.

  Mosjoukine wasn’t working by then, as far as Ilya could tell. Things had been disappearing one by one from the apartment. Sold for money or traded for the things they needed. But Mosjoukine told Ilya’s doctors he would get his son’s mother. He told Ilya he was going to bring Sophie from Prague if he had to drug her and put her in a suitcase. Then he left that night. “I got better,” Ilya said, his voice dropping so low I had to lean close to hear him. “But he never came back. I waited and waited.”

  The police searched for him, first as Adrien Meis and then, at Ilya’s insistence, as Ivan Mosjoukine, but they couldn’t find any sign. The French embassy in Prague made inquiries. Nothing. When Ilya was finally well enough to leave the hospital, he was sent to a boys’ home. After a year, he ran away and came back to live in Mosjoukine’s apartment. No one had been there while he was away. No one ever came to collect rent. As far as Ilya knew, Mosjoukine had owned the flat since he arrived in Paris in the ‘20s. When he was rich, he’d used it as a retreat. When he was broke, a place to hide from bill collectors. As far as Ilya knew, Mosjoukine’s name was still on the deed. Ilya had never bothered to find out. All he knew was he’d taken the extra keys hidden in the drain spout and moved in, starting life on his own at fourteen.

  “I thought he would turn up,” my brother said. “I was going to beat the shit out of him, old man or no, for letting the colonel take you, for taking me away from our mother. For running, just when I needed him. I was sure he hadn’t gone after Sophie when I was sick, had never so much as set foot on Czech soil. But he never returned. So I got over it. Then one day, I counted up the years and realized: The son of a bitch. He must be dead.”

  “I think I need coffee,” I said. We’d finished the last of the wine. Ilya made a pot, stronger this time. No sugar.

  Over the years after he left Prague with Mosjoukine, Ilya said, he’d written and written to our mother, but she’d never answered. Of course the mail in those days was so uncertain. In Czechoslovakia, even the censors had censors. Then in 1989, in those last months before the wall came tumbling down, when all the Skodas started pouring out of Czechoslovakia by way of Budapest and Vienna, when it became clear no one was stopping them anymore, not the border guards or the secret police or the army, he’d borrowed a friend’s Fiat and driven to Prague to find Sophie. “I was the only car headed east,” he said.

  He’d found only his old neighbors, still Reds, still sure the Soviets would come to their rescue one more time. They told him Sophie had died the previous year. She’d fallen down the steep concrete stairs of their apartment block. They told him they were sure that the dissident who had been forced to work as the janitor—class traitor—had loosened the bulb to make the stairwell dangerously dark. They were sure that he, or someone else in the building, someone who was not loyal like them, had tripped her or pushed her, just to see a good woman fall.

  Thinking of Sophie, thinking of her in the dish shop, in a thousand scenes in the building where she reported someone for the smallest infraction of the rules, Ilya was sure that was probably what had happened. Some neighbor had finally had enough and given her just the smallest of shoves. I thought of Sophie in the instant she realized she was falling. What had she been thinking? I wondered. It was probably too much to believe it was of her lost children.

  Ilya got up, opened a window, letting cool night air flow into the room, then he came back to our spot on the carpet.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  So I told Ilya a little about growing up in America with my parents. As he listened I could tell he was thinking, What would it have been like to be an American? Would I have been happy? I told him about being happy, about having a husband and a daughter I loved.

  Then we were silent for a while, sitting surrounded by all those pictures of men and women who had made silence their profession.

  Then I told Ilya about finding my father dying and finding my mother dead and about the car accident. I got out the pictures of my husband and daughter. “How can they be dead?” he asked, touching their faces.

  “They’re dead,” I said. Then, for the first time since the accident, I let myself say their names. My husband Ben. My daughter Julia. “She was only eight,” I said, staring at her last school picture. “Is that fair? Is dying that young ever fair?”

  Ilya put his hand on my wrist. “Eight years is eight years,” he said. “It’s not nothing. At least she had that.”

  As we sat on the floor in the living room, it seemed we were surrounded by death and the wreckage of lives. The furniture had held up better than the people who had owned it. The couch alone was probably a hundred years old. Sitting on the dusty carpet—crying, I was crying again—I was sure I would never make it that far.

  “Are you tired?” Ilya asked, after we had been quiet for a while. “You should sleep.”

  I shook my head. “Bad dreams,” I said.

  My brother stood up, brushing off the front of his jeans. He offered me his hand. “Then let’s go out. Enough of all this talking. Let’
s find someplace with music loud enough to keep us from thinking. Let’s go someplace and dance.”

  10

  We went back to belleville, climbing the steep streets toward the shadowy heights of the Buttes Chaumont. But we didn’t get that far. We turned into a neighborhood of apartment blocks, more bad postwar urban planning. We stopped at the end of one dark street, in front of an especially faceless six-story block. Ilya looked at the bells, picked one, rang it two, three, then four times. A crackle came from the speaker. “Who?” a male voice said. I could hear music behind him, pounding away.

  “It’s me,” Ilya said. “Let us in.” The buzzer on the front door sounded, and we went in, crowded into an elevator barely big enough for the two of us.

  Ilya pressed the button for the basement, and the elevator sank with a sickening jerk. As soon as the elevator stopped and Ilya stepped out with me behind him, a man bounded up and grabbed Ilya around the neck with one arm. I jumped back, hitting my head on the open elevator door. “You came,” the man said. It was Nolo, the African from La Sirène. “Good, good,” Nolo was saying, “And you brought a girl. Better and better.”

  We followed Nolo into a vast basement with plywood storage bins down one side, the numbers of the apartment units stenciled on them with spray paint. Lights, hot spots, were strung from the ceiling, and a DJ was set up at one end playing music. The noise hit me like a wall, like a kick in the chest. Under the lights a solid mass of people were dancing, their arms waving over their heads like a field of wheat in a strong wind.

  “Nolo is from Mali,” Ilya shouted. “The DJ is his cousin. Come on,” he said, and tried to lead me into the crowd.

  I pulled my hand away. I couldn’t imagine joining such a crush of people. “In a minute, “ I shouted. I thought I saw a table covered with bottles in the far corner of the basement. “I need a drink.” Ilya shrugged, pushed forward into the dancers. In a minute, his arms were waving among all the others—black and white, all bare but Ilya’s. I kept seeing the blue arms of his sweater even though, between the lights and the bodies, it was as hot as if we were diamond miners inside the earth, much further below ground than a single story.