I went to pour myself a glass of wine, but there was a fish bowl on the table filled with bills, with one and two euro coins, and that stopped me. I’d left my purse in Ilya’s apartment. I didn’t have any money. “Here,” a voice said in my ear. A hand dropped a coin in the bowl. I turned. The voice belonged to a tall woman in an African robe though she was white, paler than me. She handed me a plastic glass, picked up one of the bottles and filled my cup. She poured herself a glass, too. “Chin-chin,” she said and clicked her plastic cup against mine.
It was quieter at this end of the basement. A tangle of pipes and duct work blocked the speakers, though the music still bounced off the far wall and came back a little delayed, an echo, as out of sync as I felt.
The woman leaned forward. “You came with Ilya,” she said into my ear.
I nodded.
She touched a square leather pouch she wore around her neck. “My name is Mei-mei. I read cards,” she said. “Want me to tell your fortune?”
I opened my mouth, sure I was going to say no. Then I thought of Robert Desnos, passing down the ranks of the condemned in Auschwitz, whispering Long Life, Long Life as a blessing. “What do I do?”
She took the pouch from around her neck, hung it around mine, then put my left hand on it. The leather felt warm from her breasts. “Think about what you want the cards to tell you. Ask them a question,” she said. Then she refilled my glass. “I’ll be right back.” I could feel my heart beating through the cards in perfect time to the drums in the music Nolo’s cousin was playing at the other end of the basement.
Where is my daughter? Where is Julia? I asked the square edges of the cards pressed between my breasts.
Then Mei-mei was back. She gestured for me to follow her. She lifted the padlock off one of the plywood storage lockers. Inside was a vinyl couch, a badly bent metal garden chair, and a low coffee table held up at one end by a concrete block. A single bulb hung from a cord over the table. On it, a candle was burning. Otherwise, the compartment was plywood walls and a concrete floor. It had all the ambience of a cattle car. She saw my expression. “It’s only my office for tonight,” she said. “One of the boys broke the lock for me. Sit down.” She waved at the couch.
I sat, put my wine on the table. She had me give her back the cards, and I watched as she shuffled, dealt them out in a cross shape on the table. I’d been expecting Tarot cards, with their elaborate drawings. When I was in high school, no sleepover or slumber party had been complete without a Tarot deck which someone was always using to read fortunes aided by a paperback with a title like Tarot Made Simple. This was a regular French deck, perfectly ordinary to American eyes, with its four suits the same as ours.
Mei-mei studied the cards. She frowned. She pulled on her lower lip. She sighed. Outside, Nolo’s cousin put on something slow, though it still had a strong drum track. A sad female vocal burbled over it. I had no idea what language the woman was singing, but I could feel the tears, hot, hotter, flowing like lava. I had asked the cards a question beyond their power to answer. Her song seemed to tell me, Gone is gone, and there is no going after.
Mei-mei looked at me. “Do you want to tell me your question? You don’t have to.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said.
“Well, then I’ll tell you what I see.” She pointed to the queen of diamonds. “That’s you. All around you are other diamonds,” she pointed. “Do you come from a close family? They are standing so near you.”
I took a deep breath, but said nothing. She stared at the cards again. Then she clucked her tongue and looked up at me. “They’re dead, aren’t they? These are your dead. They are all around you, watching everything you do.”
Suddenly, strongly, I wanted to be somewhere else. I must have started to stand, because I felt Mei-mei’s hand on my knee, forcing me back down. “They’re worried,” she said. “They are worried about you.”
I looked down at the cards and saw a wet drop fall on the two of diamonds. Then another. I wanted the water to be sweat, to be my body trying to make sense of itself, to cool down. But they were tears. Saltwater rolled out of my eyes and down my nose as if I had nothing to do with it at all. I put my hands on my face. Even with my eyes covered, I felt a shadow fall across the cards. I looked up. Ilya was standing in the doorway, leaning on the plywood frame.
“Do you want to ask another question?” I heard Mei-mei ask me.
“She wants to know when she’ll be happy,” Ilya said. “Isn’t that what everyone asks, pet?”
Mei-mei shrugged by way of acknowledging the truth of that. She looked at the cards again, then at me. “Something is holding you back,” she said.
I pointed at the cards around the queen, “The people I …” I couldn’t bring myself to say “lost.” I hated to think of them as lost.
She shook her head. “This is something you’re doing. Or did. I see it as fear, as a thick rope holding you back. Otherwise, I see talent. I see great achievement.” I tried to imagine a rope tied around my leg. Or maybe my neck. A rope keeping me from moving forward as real as the lines Ilya and Nolo used to tie off the canal boat.
Ilya laughed. “Ah, everyone Mei-mei sees is so talented.”
Mei-mei laughed. “Not you, you bastard,” she said. “I have heard you play violin. You are the black hole of no talent.”
Ilya threw up his hands. “Come dance, both of you,” he said, losing patience. Then he turned, shouted something to someone across the room.
“Sure,” Mei-mei said. She swept the cards together, put them back in her pouch. “You okay?” she put her hand on my knee again. “Want to dance?”
I shook my head. I rapped on the top of the broken coffee table. “I feel like dead wood.”
She took a small box out of a pocket in the side of her robe, opened it, and handed me a yellow pill. It had a happy face on it, but one with its eyes closed—a happy dreamer. “Here,” she said, “one problem solved.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Do you care?”
Honestly, I didn’t. I washed it down with my wine, and then I followed Meimei and Ilya to the dance floor.
I danced. One minute I was standing there, not dancing, and then I was. I was one person moving in a mass of moving. The music passed through the crowd like a current, like fast running water, and we were swimming like trout in a clear steam, swimming all out just to stay in the same spot. I thought, I don’t exist. Then, No one exists. By that I meant as single bodies, as lone sets of legs walking on an uncaring planet. A botanist I’d once met at a party told me that in Michigan there was a single fungus that was the world’s largest living creature and that it covered hundreds of acres. They’d always thought it was many separate funguses, but now they knew they were wrong. Trees in a forest were not separate organisms either, he said. Their roots knit them together. Infect one, and the disease would spread to all. Feed or water one, and all the trees would be greener, taller. I’d thought he was stoned. I’d thought he was full of shit. Now I was higher than high, and what he’d said made all kinds of sense. I was dancing with more legs than I had, waving more arms than I could count.
Sometimes Ilya was there, sometimes Mei-mei or Nolo. Most often I danced with people I didn’t know but who looked so familiar. They looked like people I’d grown up with or taught or the young teachers who had taught Julia. Why worry about who was family, I found myself thinking over and over, each realization the same revelation, when all humans looked so much alike, when you couldn’t tell them apart once they started dancing. At some point, I flung off my stolen sweater. Who knows where it went. The heat was so thick I felt it like a second skin. I think we danced for hours. Maybe we danced for days. No one stopped. The crowd changed sometimes, more white, then darker, more men, then more women. It never got smaller.
Finally Nolo tapped me on the shoulder. He gestured for me to follow him. I smiled at him, grabbed his hands. I wanted him dancing. He shook his head, led me by both hands out of the mass and o
nto the open stretch of basement floor. “Your brother is looking for you,” he shouted in my ear, and led me through a side door, up a short flight of stairs to a back alley. Ilya was standing in the cool dark of the morning, looking up at a few vague stars. In the east, the sun was just starting to rise. I stared up, trying to count the stars as they disappeared before the advancing, shimmering waves of pink. My ears felt numb. After the sheer decibels of the music, the morning was pure silent movie.
“Did you hear Kumé singing?” Nolo, also half deaf, shouted to Ilya. I realized he was talking about the woman I had heard singing so slowly while Mei-mei read my cards and at least one other time while I danced. Though I hadn’t seen her, she must have actually been there, in the basement, a live singer and not a recording.
Ilya nodded. “She’s good.”
“Better and better,” Nolo said. Nolo lit a cigarette, then lit another and offered it to Ilya. My brother took it, inhaled, blew the smoke out through his nose. Nolo offered me the pack. I started to take it. Why not? I’d never smoked, but what was the point in saying no? But Ilya put his hand on the cigarettes, pushing the pack back to Nolo.
Nolo laughed. “Yeah, got to look out for your little sister, right?”
Ilya coughed, then kept coughing, until he was bent over. When he stood up, he tossed his cigarette over the railing into the darkness. “Actually,” he said to Nolo, “Vera is older by a whole minute, or so our mother always said, so she’s only my little sister if you are talking about size.”
I was still staring up at the stars as they winked out, one by one. I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want it to be the start of an ordinary day. I put out my tongue, full of the idea I could taste a star like a snowflake. I wondered what the world had looked like to me during that long minute when I’d been alone in the world. If Ilya, still in the womb, had missed me, wondered where I had gone.
“Time to go home, comrade,” Ilya said to Nolo. “You and I work today.”
Nolo groaned. “You got the wrong attitude, friend. It’s too late to sleep. You can do that later. You can do that when you’re dead.”
We left Nolo smoking in the alley and walked home, passing other late night partiers, hearing music from clubs we passed. It was cool, the morning air damp. Ilya pulled off his blue sweater again and gave it to me. “Here,” he said. “What happened to yours?”
I shrugged. It was either back in the basement or already on its way home on some other dancer’s chilled arms. This time, instead of wearing it like a shawl, I pulled Ilya’s sweater over my head. On him it was long, but on me it reached to my knees.
We passed a bar where more men and women were spilling into the street. In Paris, on a Saturday night, my brother said, either you went home early, before the Metro stopped running, or you stayed out until morning when it started again. Ilya stopped at a bakery off the Boulevard de la Villette and bought a flute of fresh bread. He offered me a bite. I shook my head, but he insisted, and we took turns eating chunks as we walked home. On the way, the shimmering pastels returned to ordinary colors. The air became once again only air. Whatever Mei-mei had given me, my liver, that busybody, was washing it and the wondrous visions that went with it from the bloodstream of my dance-worn body.
When we reached the entrance to the Place Ste-Odile, I heard the voices of a man arguing and a woman answering back. I recognized the voice of the neighbor. What was she doing out so early? Then a man came stomping through the arch, dressed in a white hospital uniform, not like a doctor would wear, but a practical nurse or an orderly. He glared at Ilya as he strode past. Ilya shook his head, disapproving.
Inside the courtyard, the neighbor was sitting quietly on her chair, giving no sign there had been any disagreement. She was darning a heavy pair of men’s socks, digging into the coarse wool with her needle.
She nodded at us. Ilya ignored her.
“Good morning, Madame,” I said, not wanting to be as rude as my brother.
She nodded again, willing to meet me halfway. She pointed her long curved needle at my feet. “Nice boots,” she said.
Ilya unlocked the front door, locked it, unlocked the apartment door, locked that one behind us as well.
“What’s her story?” I asked.
He tossed the keys on the kitchen table, lit the burner on the stove. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she lives in that courtyard. What is she, just professionally nosey?”
“It’s her place of business,” he said, as he put the coffee pot on. “She sells,” he paused for a moment, “pharmaceuticals.”
“Drugs.”
He tilted his head to one side in that French way that meant, Not exactly. “You saw the orderly?”
I nodded. “Yes, and yesterday there was a doctor there. I’d seen him in the courtyard at the hospital.”
“Yes, the doctors come during business hours. They’re the customers. The orderlies, janitors, they’re the suppliers. Usually they come before dawn. That one was late and, no doubt, that was part of the argument.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Doctors and pharmacists at the hospital, at any hospital, get tempted. They are around so many drugs. If they are tired, they can take a little of the therapeutic grade cocaine from the surgery or write themselves a prescription for a nice amphetamine. If they have trouble sleeping, first they can try sleeping pills, then codeine. Then, if it gets really bad, morphine injections.” Ilya poured the coffee, our current drug. “After a while, if they keep it up, they get caught. Boom, no more job, no more wife and children, no more life.
“On the other hand, what the workers like the orderlies at the hospital need, more than extra energy or sleep, is money. They have big families, here and back in the countries they left. They’re willing to risk getting caught stealing if the reward is big enough. The doctors, who have money, would rather pay for their drugs and stay doctors. So enter our neighbor, the spider. She used to be a nurse, they say, a long time ago. Now she is the middleman, the store that buys wholesale and sells retail. She buys the drugs the orderlies have stolen, and she sells them to the doctors, making a very nice profit. All she risks is jail and, honestly, what would she do there so different than what she does all day in front of her house? Sit, scrub, mop. With the muscles she has on her, she could certainly take care of herself. Think of it as the perfect expression of capitalism. Think of it as the way money always finds its way in the world. Our mother,” he finished his cup of coffee, “would hate it.”
“But you do, too. Why?” I asked. “What’s it to you?” His friend, Mei-mei, had just given me a smiley faced tablet.
“It isn’t money she takes from people. It’s their life. They start easy enough, once a week maybe, I see them. Then every day. Twice a day.” He set his cup in the sink so hard I thought I heard it crack.
“Okay,” I said, surprised at his outburst, surprised he cared about something enough to get angry. I hadn’t seen any sign of that until now.
Ilya stood at the sink a moment, took a deep, raspy breath, let it go. He looked at the clock on the stove. It was nearly 7:30. “Poof,” he said, blowing air out through his lips. “Where did the night go?”
Ilya gave me an old shirt to sleep in, a towel, and pointed the way to the bathroom, which was two doors off the kitchen. Inside was a toilet, a claw-footed tub—no shower—and an old-fashioned pedestal sink. I sat on the edge of the tub and pulled off my boots, tossed them into the far corner. My socks stank. I peeled off my stolen clothes. They were soaked in sweat and smelled strongly of smoke. I dropped everything in the corner. I knew I was just as sweaty, but I was too tired to face the bath and settled for washing my face, doing an index-finger-as-toothbrush routine. Then I put on the shirt Ilya had given me. It was very fine, very worn cotton with a subtle blue pin stripe and what had once been elegant French cuffs, now frayed to soft Kleenex. The shirt must have been one of Mosjoukine’s.
When I came out, Ilya called me from the living room. I could
sleep in the front bedroom. “Mine is back there, off the kitchen,” he said, leading the way. “But this is the better room.” He opened the door, and I saw I was wrong in thinking that the living room was full of odd furniture because the bedrooms had been emptied. This one had another carved armoire, two marble-topped dressers, a couple of upholstered chairs, a fainting couch, a bedside table, and a double poster bed of the same dark mahogany as the other furniture. There was hardly room to move between the heavy, footed pieces. The high bed was made up with a half-dozen feather pillows and a vast hump of feather comforter.
Ilya took the comforter off the bed, opened the window, and gave it a vigorous shake. Dust and feathers flew. Down below, I could hear the neighbor first sneeze, then cough twice. “Stupid Jew,” I heard her say.
“Bless you, too, Cow,” he called back. He slung the comforter back on the bed.
“Good night, Vera,” Ilya said, yawning. “Good dreams. Or none at all.” I had climbed onto the bed and tucked my feet under the comforter. He turned to leave.
“You know,’” I said, “everyone else in the world calls me Emma.”
“Do you want me to call you Emma?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” my brother said.
“What?”
“The name on my birth certificate is Ivan Ilyich.”
“The same as Mosjoukine’s?”
“Yes.”
“Our mother named us Vera and Ivan?”
“Yes.”
“Is that romantic or sad?” I asked, thinking of Sophie, giving birth alone in Paris while Mosjoukine was God only knew where.
“Sad,” Ilya said. “Very sad.”
Then he closed the door behind him and, as soon as he did, I fell asleep.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 12
