My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  I didn’t dream about the car accident or my dead parents. I had the influenza dream again, the one in which I was Vera Holodnaya and I couldn’t breathe, no matter how many pillows were propped up behind me. “Vera!” I heard coughing and someone calling, “Vera!”

  I opened one eye. I was in the bed from my dream, pillows, comforter. Light was shining through the open window. Awake, thank God, I could breathe. Ilya, standing by the bed, was the one who was coughing. “I have to go to work,” he said. “I’m late already. Here are keys to the front door and the apartment.” He set them on the bedside table, and I heard the click of brass on marble in the base of my skull. How long had I slept? An hour? Two? How long had he? “I have a double run today. Three hours to La Villette, lunch, then three hours back, so I won’t be home until after dark. In the meantime, if you want to spend time with our father …” Ilya said as he opened the doors of the armoire.

  I raised myself on one elbow, expecting to see rank on rank of vintage, custom-tailored suits to match my rag of a shirt. Instead, I saw a small TV and a video player stuck in one corner, their cords in a tangle, and beside them an untidy pile of tapes labeled with black marker. I saw the titles Michel Strogoff, L’Enfant du Carnaval, and half a dozen more I couldn’t quite decipher. “Don’t go crazy,” Ilya said.

  I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes. “My God,” I said. “You have everything. Don’t you want me to wait so you can watch them with me?”

  He shook his head. “I never want to see another silent film if I live to be a hundred.” He picked up his violin case. “Especially not one with Mosjoukine.”

  By the door, Ilya turned. “Don’t forget to eat something,” he said. “I made coffee.” Then he was gone. I closed my eyes. In a minute, I would get up. In a minute, I would figure out how to set up the TV and the video player. Ben had always laughed at my inability to use even the simplest electronics. I always threw my hands up in despair, and he had taken over. Julia had been a whiz compared to me, had known her way around a remote before she could reach the TV and would offer to help me. Now I would just have to do it myself or it would not get done. Then I rolled over and went down like a drowning sailor into the deep sea of sleep.

  When I woke, I lay in bed for a moment, taking inventory. First a physical inventory: my head hurt, the soles of my feet felt like someone had beaten them with bamboo rods, and I had a stabbing pain in my back over my left wing bone. I sat up in bed, tried stretching. Even the muscles under my arms hurt. Who knew you had muscles in your armpits? What had I been doing? Dancing or rowing a slave galley like Ramón Novarro in the silent Ben-Hur?

  Then an emotional inventory: what did I feel besides stiff? I felt around gingerly, my thoughts a tongue probing my soul for sore spots. Sophie, my mother, was dead. Back in New York, I had imagined it would be Sophie I found, Sophie who let me into her apartment, her kitchen, her life. Now what Ilya told me about our mother was all I would ever know.

  Yet I felt less sad than excited. I felt a buzz, a static of anticipation. I wanted to watch the tapes in the armoire. I wanted to see Mosjoukine’s movies, all of them that still existed. I wanted to see more of this once-famous father of mine or, rather, of ours. That was the real shocker—not that my parents were dead, that was bitterly familiar territory—but that I had a brother, a twin brother. I didn’t know what I thought of that. It did mean I had family, something I’d hurled myself halfway around the planet to find. But not much family, not a house overrunning with nephews and nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins. Instead, I had gone from being the last member of a nearly extinct tribe to sharing my desert island with one other human. A human with as few ties to the rest of humanity as I had. Or so it seemed.

  The truth was, I didn’t know. Had Ilya ever been married? There was a question. I thought of Ilya dancing last night at the party. Did he have children? For all I knew, he could be like Mosjoukine. He could have children with eyes that matched his, matched Mosjoukine’s, in every arrondissement in Paris. Meimei seemed to know him well. The truth was my brother could be a thief or a pedophile or a junkie. Had he gone back to school after he escaped the boys’ home? How had he survived on his own since fourteen? Had he any education at all? Held any job besides tour guide? I didn’t know this new brother of mine any better than a talkative stranger who sat next to me on a train.

  Outside the window, I heard the bang of a bucket, the splash of a mop. I got out of bed and peeked through the curtain. The neighbor was on duty, scrubbing the stones so hard with her thick, muscled arms it was a wonder she didn’t wear them away. The doctor in the gray suit was there. This time I saw him slip the bills into the pocket of her housedress while she was busy slopping soapy water on the pavement, then take out a small packet wrapped in white butcher paper.

  I went to the kitchen and got myself a cup of coffee. The coffee was cold, but I didn’t care. I added milk, the last in the refrigerator, and three heaping teaspoons of sugar. I thought about bread—there was a half-loaf on the table—but it seemed too tough to chew, too hard to swallow without Ilya there to force-feed me like a stubborn bird.

  I went into the bathroom, stripped, and crouched in the tub. There was no plug, just a length of tubing attached to the faucet. I hosed my body, soaped toe to head, scrubbing even my hair with the bar soap, then rinsed. I had to search the tall cupboards on one wall for a towel. For lack of anything else, I put Mosjoukine’s shirt back on. I needed my last pair of clean underwear, but where had I left my purse? I found it beside the chair I’d sunk into after getting my first look at Mosjoukine’s apartment. I thought about getting the makeup bag out, too, but in all honesty, the life I was living made the circles around my eyes deep and dark without cosmetics.

  I gathered up my clothes from the floor and carried them into the kitchen. I was going to miss the sweater I’d tossed into the dancers. It was early in spring to go sleeveless. I washed the pants and the shell, my underwear and socks in dish detergent, laid them out on towels on the tub to dry. Then I stood for a long minute in front of the second door off the kitchen. It was Ilya’s room. I had no excuse to go in. I should stay the hell out. But I had to see where my brother slept, the room where he lived. I opened the door. The first thing I saw were old soccer posters on the walls. A map of France like a schoolboy might have.

  I guessed this had been his room since Mosjoukine brought him from Prague, maybe from when he was little, living here with Sophie. Had I ever slept in this room? Had we both slept here that summer after Livvy had given me back? Or had we been little enough to sleep in the big bed with our mother? For furniture, there was only a futon, a metal desk, and some impromptu board and block bookcases. Clearly, this was the source of the extra furniture in the living room. I imagined a teenage Ilya pushing all the dark, waxed mahogany out of his space, across the kitchen linoleum, and into the living room where the armoire and dressers stood now.

  I hesitated, then stepped into his room. I imagined he had built the cases for books like the Houdini biography I’d seen him reading, or maybe model cars or trophies, the things the teenage boys I’d known always had on display, but now the shelves were dusty and bare. He’d swept that part of his past away. A corkboard hung over the desk, but it was empty except for two snapshots, one on top of the other, stabbed through with a single pushpin. I unpinned them. The first was a picture of a younger Ilya in a fencing outfit with a pretty, red-haired woman at his side. He looked like he was in his late twenties. He was smiling, his weapon raised in mock salute. He had his arm around the woman’s shoulders. His hair was long and wet with sweat, as if he had just finished a fight or a round or whatever a match in fencing was called, and his eyes said, as clearly as they would have in any silent movie, that he had won. Both victory and this woman belonged to him.

  The second snapshot showed Ilya standing by the canal boat. His hair was even shorter than mine, his head nearly bald. He looked pale, seasick maybe. The sun must have been directly overhead. His eyes were cast down, and I
could see the lines etched in deep shadow on either side of his mouth. He looked years older than in the first picture. Was he? Probably. I looked at the backs of the photos, but there was no way to tell. I carefully pinned them back as I’d found them. The Ilya who thought he would always win blotting out Ilya alone.

  A stack of folded, well-worn jeans sat on the desk. Beside them was a pile of neatly rolled socks. All fresh from the laundry. I took a pair of jeans off the top, held them to my waist. They were six inches too long but otherwise a good fit. I put them on, then a pair of socks. I rolled the jeans. If I wanted to go out, I could tuck them into my boots. A pair of jeans and clean socks seemed within the limits of what one sibling could borrow from another, even without asking, though it was hard for me to be sure. I peeked in the desk drawers and saw only pens and a roll of double-sided tape. I saw nothing that could have been Mosjoukine’s. No silk ties or engraved cuff links.

  I went back to the bedroom I’d slept in and wrestled the TV out of the armoire, carried it into the living room. Then I did the same thing with the tape player and the tall stack of dusty tapes. I set the TV and VCR deck up on the floor, brought pillows and the comforter from the bed, and made myself a small nest on the carpet. Then I sorted through the tapes. I got John’s faxed list from my purse, smoothed the sheets of folded paper, compared it to the labels on the tapes. The earliest film Ilya had was Father Sergius, filmed in Russia in 1917. “In this film based on Tolstoy, Mosjoukine ages from age 18 to 80,” read the description on John’s fax. If I was going to work my way forward through my father’s film life, it looked like Father Sergius would act as a sort of preview, a fast forward through his aging. Then I would watch the others, one by one.

  It would take all my attention. Ben swore there’d been no popcorn in theaters until sound. With silents, you couldn’t take your eyes off the screen. You had to watch to catch every gesture, every expression, had to read what dialogue there was. You had to pay absolute attention. “We should live life like that,” he’d said.

  I put in the first tape.

  11

  The title for father sergius appeared. Sergius was deadly serious from the beginning, Mosjoukine’s expression fierce, his nose and eyebrows drawn in with dark lines. His character, a prince, becomes a solitary monk, renouncing flesh and the world. Then, in the middle of a long winter night, a divorced woman seeks him out to seduce him. She slithers around his cell, trying to tempt him. To resist her, Father Sergius picks up his ax and, with a swift blow, cuts off his own finger.

  I turned off the TV and went into the kitchen. I wasn’t sure I could watch Mosjoukine’s work if more of his films were like Sergius than Kean. I wasn’t nearly Slavic enough for such grimness. I could hear Ilya’s voice, “Don’t forget to eat something,” so I found a banana on top of the refrigerator, peeled and ate it, washing down each bite with a mouthful of water. I felt as dry as dust, as if by crying so much in the weeks since the accident I’d been emptied of everything living or moist, even my own spit. My eyes felt gritty, my eyelids scraping each time I blinked. I sat at the table, moving crumbs around with my finger—the same finger Mosjoukine chopped off with his ax in Father Sergius—as if the crumbs were parts of a complex jigsaw puzzle I couldn’t quite solve.

  I thought about going out for a walk. I thought about going to the bakery, the butcher, the market to buy food and make dinner. I had loved to cook for Ben and Julia. I closed my sand-dry eyes, remembered Ben at the table, saying, “Look at all this wonderful food your mother made us!” Food was love. Food was showing every day you cared. Now I couldn’t remember a thing I’d made them. I took the water and went back into the living room, afraid that if I stopped now, after Father Sergius, I would never start in again.

  The next film, L’Enfant du Carnaval, was as different from Father Sergius as the setting, semitropical Nice instead of Siberia. A smiling Mosjoukine appears in a harlequin’s outfit. This is Mosjoukine transformed, as if leaving Russia had let centuries drop from his shoulders. He stands beside a dark velvet curtain, then he yanks it aside to reveal dancing carnival crowds below.

  L’Enfant du Carnaval, John’s list said, was the first film Mosjoukine directed as well as wrote. The plot was standard farce. A woman abandoned by her husband leaves a baby boy on the rich playboy Mosjoukine’s doorstep. Thinking the child is his, he tries to care for the baby alone without knowing so much as how to fasten a diaper. Then enters the baby’s mother, hired as the much-needed nurse. Just another comic turn, but Mosjoukine falls in love with her, and his intensity changes the film. They both love the baby, a boy Mosjoukine names Paul. Mosjoukine has no idea the woman is the baby’s mother. But love, like a tight band, pulls them closer and closer. Mosjoukine’s character finds meaning in his son, in family. I wanted to believe this. Believe, if given a chance, Mosjoukine would have been the best of fathers. Every time he cooed at Paul, I thought, That’s my father, looking at Paul the way he would at Ilya, his own little son.

  The plot builds toward happiness, and I found myself hugging my knees, I wanted a good end so badly. The woman is told her husband has gone down on an Atlantic steamer. By now, Mosjoukine knows she is the boy’s mother and that he is not the real father. He asks her to marry him, begs her, finally overcomes her objections. Happiness is about to break out. But returning home from their wedding, whom do they find but the missing husband, waiting to reclaim his family. Mosjoukine says good-bye to his new wife, in a scene where he is limited to straightening her collar, to touching the flowers on her dress. He lets her go. Then in the last scene, Mosjoukine runs to the balcony, throws open the doors, and cries out not for his wife but for the boy he loves as his own, My son, my son Paul! How can you take him from me!

  How could Ilya watch this and doubt that Mosjoukine had it in him to love a son. I ran the last scene again. I wanted to cry and cry more. I tried, I felt it, but my eyes stayed as dry as the dust in the carpet. I was watching it for the third time when I heard Ilya’s key in the lock. He came through the door, violin in one hand, a net bag full of groceries in the other. When he saw what I was watching, he froze. “My son, my son,” the last title on the screen read, then Mosjoukine’s face filled the screen, his eyes wet and shimmering.

  “The old bastard,” my brother said. “Always a close-up with tears in his eyes.”

  I turned off the tape, a rush of static filling the TV screen. Ilya stepped over me without a word, heading for the kitchen. I trailed after him, wrapped in the comforter. “You told me to watch his movies.”

  He shook his head, not meaning No but more That was a mistake. “I know,” he said. He took a bottle of wine out of the bag, a head of cabbage. “Did you eat?” I played with the bottle, tipping it this way and that. Picking it up to look at the label without reading it. I wasn’t sure, but I thought we were about to get into a real fight.

  “A banana,” I said.

  “And?”

  “A glass of water?”

  He sighed. “When you were a mother, did your daughter have to feed you?”

  I banged the bottle on the table. “You have no right to say that. I was a good mother. I fixed Julia a hot breakfast every morning. I packed her lunch. I made her dinner every single night.” Organic vegetables, I wanted to say. Made her drink her milk for the calcium, eat her spinach for the beta-carotene. So she could die with no cavities. So she could die with strong bones.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. He had his back to me, coring the cabbage in the sink.

  “Go to hell,” I said, and slung the wine across the room at the wall beside him. I imagined exploding glass, wine red as blood running down Mosjoukine’s faded wall. Instead the bottle bounced off the wall and hit Ilya hard in the shoulder. I heard it thud to the floor, roll across the linoleum.

  Ilya spun around, the cabbage in one hand, kitchen knife in the other. His face was a blank of surprise. Then, just as quickly, he held the cabbage in front of his face, and pretended to draw the knife across his throat. Then he dr
opped the cabbage, and we stared as it rolled across the floor as if we were citizens of the Republic taking a day off to watch executions at the guillotine. It rolled under the table and came to rest next to the unbroken bottle of wine.

  “Feel better?” Ilya asked. I looked up at him. His eyes were twinkling a bright blue. The corners of his mouth turned up in a sly smile.

  “Good acting,” I said.

  He tilted his head, acknowledging the compliment. “Like father …” he said.

  At dinner, he let me talk on and on about Mosjoukine, though he spent a lot of time moving the cabbage around his plate, cutting the sausage he’d cooked to go with it into smaller and smaller bites without actually eating much.

  I told him about my theory of Mosjoukine’s movies rehearsing what was to come in his life. I explained about my novel set in Paris ending with a birth I had yet to experience. As I spoke, I realized the novel also opened with the unexpected death of a husband. What did that mean? I put down my fork, but Ilya seemed to be a beat behind.

  “You wrote a book?” he asked.

  “Yes, a novel.”

  “And published it?”

  I nodded, “In hardback and paper. There were even German and Japanese editions.” I remembered how strange it had seemed to see my name on a book filled with words I couldn’t read.

  “But not French?”

  “No.”

  “Even though it’s about Paris?”

  “Everyone writes about Paris,” I said. “And, besides, the French write plenty of their own books.”

  “I’d like to read it, though,” he said. “I can’t in Japanese or German or English.” I hadn’t thought about that. It had been a long time since anyone had asked to read something I’d written.

  “Did you write other books?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” I could only shake my head again. “You aren’t the only one, you know,” Ilya said, pushing his plate away.