My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  “Only what?”

  “Illegitimate child of Mosjoukine who turned out to be a writer.”

  I looked at him, one eyebrow raised.

  “Oh, no, not me,” he laughed. “People say the novelist Romain Gary was Mosjoukine’s son. Do you know who he was?” I didn’t. “He was a pilot with the Free French, a bit of a hero, then a diplomat. His mother was a Polish actress who had known Mosjoukine in Moscow. Gary wrote a novel that won the Prix Goncourt. Then he wrote another novel and won it again, making him the only writer ever to win twice.” Ilya laughed.

  “So?” I said. I didn’t get the joke.

  “The rules say an author can only win the Goncourt once, so Gary wrote the second prize-winning book under a pseudonym, Émile Ajar. It was a scandal.”

  “Mosjoukine was his father?”

  Ilya shrugged. “Gary wrote a memoir, Promise of Dawn. It’s mostly about his mother, who loved him more than life. The book tells about how poor they were, how she struggled to get them to France, to turn Gary into a French ambassador. She did, too. When she is really desperate, she sends off a letter and a picture of the boy to someone. Money appears by return mail. Mosjoukine is there in the book. Taking the boy to tea at a fancy hotel, sending him a red bicycle once.”

  A red bicycle. I looked at Ilya. He nodded.

  “I don’t think you would have trouble reading between the lines. Besides …” Ilya got up from the table, went into the living room. I heard a drawer open and shut. “What do you think?” He handed me a book with Romain Gary posed, chin on hand, on the back cover. He had Mosjoukine’s eyes, the high forehead, and strong nose. In his long hair and a beard, he was a dead ringer for Father Sergius. Amazing, another brother.

  “Do you know him? Does he live in Paris?”

  “Lived,” Ilya said. Of course, I thought, of course, he was dead. “I never met him.” I looked at the book again. Above the author photo were some comments by a critic, talking about Gary in the past tense. “The unifying element of Gary’s life,” the jacket read, “was the problem of identity. In his life, in his work, in his physical appearance even, Gary never ceased changing, superimposing faces, names, identities, ending up writing his own life like one of his books.” A chameleon like Mosjoukine, I thought, as if I needed more proof. What was it with us?

  “Gary committed suicide,” Ilya said, “in 1980.”

  Suicide, even worse. “Why?” I said, though I don’t know what I expected Ilya to say, how he could answer for this long dead possible brother.

  “Do you know who Jean Seberg was?”

  “The actress in Goddard’s Breathless?” I told him I had a friend from Iowa, Jean Seberg’s home state, who was obsessed with her, obsessed with how the FBI had hounded her over her connection to the Black Panthers, had spread the lie she was carrying a black child, had tormented her until she miscarried. This friend even had a tape of the press conference Seberg had called to prove the child had, after all, been white. He tried to get people to watch it when he had parties at his house, which was odd, and sometimes they did, which seemed even odder.

  “That was Romain Gary’s child,” Ilya said. “Gary and Seberg’s.”

  “Seberg committed suicide, too.” I knew that from my friend.

  “Then he did a year later, though by the time she died, they’d been divorced for a decade.”

  “Jesus,” I said. More Slavic endings. A whole family history with nothing but these special sad denouements where, instead of being rescued, every last soul on the ship drowns.

  Ilya stood to make coffee, but started coughing, bending over the table. He sat down again. I went to put my hand on his forehead. “Do you have a fever?” I said. He knocked my hand away.

  “You’re not my mother,” he said, struggling to catch his breath.

  I stepped back. “No, no, I’m not that.”

  He pushed himself up from the chair, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. I could hear him coughing, harder than before, then it stopped. I cleared the dishes, washed up. Then I went into the living room and sorted through the rest of the tapes, trying to decide what to watch next. I picked The Late Mathias Pascal, the one that had given Mosjoukine his French alias, Adrien Meis.

  I heard Ilya come out of the bathroom. The door to his bedroom opened, closed, then I heard him behind me. Before I could think of what to say and turn, he had unlocked the front door and was gone.

  So I settled down with our father in The Late Mathias Pascal. Mosjoukine, as Mathias Pascal, works in a ramshackle library where he spends his days fishing for rats with kittens on strings, letting them wander through haphazard piles of decaying books hunting. When they catch a rat, he gently reels them in. But then tragedy strikes. Mosjoukine carries his dead baby daughter through a storm in a futile attempt to satisfy his dying mother’s wish to see her only grandchild. Pure melodrama, but Mosjoukine’s face and body are racked by such sorrow, such anger and frustration, that I leaned toward the screen trying to catch each current of emotion. The plot might be contrived, but he knew loss, and I did, too. I had felt what he was feeling, the need to grieve, the need to laugh at the absurdity of such a loss, the urge to turn toward God and curse or bow—but he did none of these, only stood as the rain came down like blunt, absolving blows. So what if he was just acting. He would have understood what I had lost and what those deaths had cost me.

  Then Mathias Pascal is mistakenly thought to have committed suicide. He declares, “Death is freedom!” He escapes debt and a bad marriage to be reborn as the joyful Adrien Meis. Just as Mosjoukine must have felt born again when he slipped out of the hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, when he escaped from the postwar Soviet Union, maybe every time he left a life, a country, a lover. Maybe the deaths of my loved ones had set me free, too. Here I was, the newly rechristened Vera, living in a new country, speaking a language my daughter would not have understood. I shook my head. This wasn’t a vision of myself—or my father—that made me happy.

  Mathias Pascal ended, and I thought about going to bed. I had no idea what time it was, but it was late. Instead I put in another tape, an earlier film, L’Angoissante Aventure, the first movie Mosjoukine and his Russian friends made on coming to France. As it played, I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep again. As I drifted off, I kept seeing Mosjoukine’s face, in turns grieving and mischievous. I saw his face layered on my brother’s face. Both more familiar than my own to me somehow. The last thought I remember having was Where is my brother? I wanted to tell him how very much he looked like our father, but Ilya still wasn’t home.

  I woke up, wrapped in the comforter on the floor. The TV was full of static. I stood, then almost fell over. My right leg was asleep. I opened the velvet curtains. It was late morning. Had Ilya ever come in? I limped into the kitchen, rubbing my numb leg. A fresh loaf of bread was on the table along with a small bunch of bananas. The bathroom door and Ilya’s bedroom door were closed. I knocked on the bathroom. No answer. I opened the door. It was empty, but my wool pants, the sleeveless shell, socks, and underwear were folded neatly by the tub. I changed into them, folding Ilya’s jeans and Mosjoukine’s shirt and putting them in the cupboard.

  I knocked on his bedroom door, once, twice. “Are you awake?” I called. “I’m coming in.” I opened the door slowly, giving my brother a chance to grab the sheets if he slept naked. The bed was empty. I went back to the kitchen. He’d been in and then he’d gone out. Was he working? I looked on the table for a note. Nothing. I went back to my nest in the living room, ejected the tape from the deck. Had I seen enough of L’Angoissante Aventure? Should I watch it again from the last thing I remembered? I looked at the tape, but it wasn’t L’Angoissante Aventure. It was Michel Strogoff, the movie Ilya said I should watch. He must have put it in for me. Okay, then, brother, I thought, I can take a hint. I got myself a banana and settled in for another movie.

  I could see why Ilya had recommended it. It was an epic swashbuckler with a plot that would have appealed, as they use
d to say, to audiences from nine to ninety-nine.

  Strogoff is a secret courier for the czar, smuggling a message to Omsk besieged by the Tartars. Disguised as a trader, he helps a young woman, Nadia, get a visa by pretending they are brother and sister, and they journey as a family. I couldn’t help comparing the scenes where the brother and sister spar, tease, flirt, get to know each other, come to each other’s defense, to Ilya and me. Mosjoukine, hands down, was more charming than Ilya. But I was no sweet blushing Nadia, either.

  When the Tartars whip his mother, Strogoff reveals himself and is captured. Their Grand Khan orders him blinded. Strogoff asks his mother not to hide her face, to keep looking at him, to be the last thing he sees as the red hot sword is pressed to his eyes.

  Strogoff, led by Nadia, still tries to reach Omsk. At the end of their strength, they take refuge in a village the Tartars have pillaged. Strogoff asks Nadia to leave him and save herself, but she refuses. As they sit against a cold stove in the deserted hut, Strogoff realizes he can just barely see the light of a votive candle flickering in front of the icon on the wall. His tears for his mother protected his eyes and saved his eyesight. A miracle! He can see!

  Is that what Ilya liked so much about the movie, that Strogoff was blind and then, because his love for his mother was so strong, was made whole again? Had Ilya’s love for our mother done either of them any good? Or was the message more universal, that love alone can save us? As much as I wanted, I couldn’t quite believe it. I had loved, and still loved. It hurt like hell. Love was not saving me.

  I rewound the tape to an earlier part of the movie. In it, a coach with Strogoff and Nadia runs wild in a storm, the coachman thrown aside by the panicked flight of the horses. Mosjoukine stands up, taking the reins in one strong hand. This is Mosjoukine at his most intense, alive, nearly manic. One hand around Nadia’s shoulders, he shouts above the wind, “Never be afraid.”

  I stopped the tape, rewound it, played it again. There, I felt my father was talking to me. Never be afraid. I had always been afraid, and what had it got me? Caution had only slowed me enough for disaster to find my family and strike. From now on, I wanted to swear to the frozen image of my father, “I will fear nothing.”

  But what exactly did that mean on a late afternoon in Paris for a new widow, an orphan two times over? I wanted to see my brother. I turned off the TV, went into the kitchen. It was nearly two. If Ilya was working, the canal boat might be passing by the hospital on its way down from La Villette any time now. I grabbed a helter-skelter picnic from the kitchen, a bottle of wine, bananas and bread, a bar of chocolate. I stuffed them in a string shopping bag. Then I got my boots from the bathroom, pulled them on, and ran down the stairs.

  12

  La sirène had made it further than I expected. I spotted the canal boat from the Swing Bridge of the Barn of the Beautiful and ran to the lock, just as the boat floated to the top. Nolo was casting off the lines, but the gates of the lock were still closed. He saw me and broke into a broad smile. He gave me his hand and helped me jump onto the bow. Ilya had his back to us, reeling out his story of the canal. Nolo held his finger to his lips. He wanted me to be a surprise. I knelt beside the coiled rope, keeping low. “I need a hand!” Nolo called, as if he were having trouble with the lines, and Ilya finished his spiel and jumped onto the roof of the cabin, the soles of his boat shoes squeaking on the polished wood, and headed forward. He did this with the light grace of our father. He did this the way he always did.

  He jumped down into the bow, saw me, and smiled, too, though not quite as instantly, as enthusiastically as Nolo. I held up the string bag. “Lunch,” I said, though it was now nearly three.

  “If it’s lunch, you’re late,” he said. I raised one shoulder by way of acknowledging the truth of what he said. I was late, but here I was.

  We finished the tour, motoring out of the lock into the long dark stretch of the tunnel and finally out into the Seine. I watched as the tourists, schoolteachers from the south of France this time, disembarked on the quay. They were even bigger tippers and kissers than the Polish grandmothers. The last one off, a petite brunette with bright pink lipstick, clung to Ilya’s hands for a moment, standing on tip-toe first to kiss him on the cheek, then to whisper something in his ear. My brother laughed. “If I get to Nice,” he said. He watched as the, teacher rejoined her colleagues, as she turned one last time to wave. I felt a rush of jealousy that made my cheeks burn.

  Nolo appeared with some coffee cups for the wine. He jabbed Ilya in the back with his elbow. “Stop working,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

  Jacques, the captain, joined us on the back deck for our picnic. He opened the wine and chipped in a small can of pâté and a jar of gherkins. “Emergency supplies,” he said. We ate paté sandwiches and slices of banana with chocolate. We drank the wine.

  Ilya poked me in the ribs and said to Nolo, “I told you she couldn’t cook.” I poked back. We really were brother and sister. The late afternoon sun shone down on all of us.

  “Play us something,” Jacques said to Ilya after a while. “You always play a good tune. Not like that other stuff.” Jacques looked at Nolo and rolled his eyes.

  Ilya opened his violin case, rosined the bow. He played a jig with more enthusiasm than the Bach I had heard him play. Then Scotland the Brave, a song Julia had learned when she first started lessons. He played with feeling and a relaxed, idiosyncratic sense of rhythm that might have shown a natural gift for jazz, though it was hard to say. Finally he played his usual, the clunky Gavotte.

  “You should practice more, man,” Nolo said. “You could get good if you tried.”

  Ilya laughed. “It’s just for the tourists. I’d do just as well with a harmonica, but since my wife left me the violin, I might as well …”

  “Wife?” someone said. It was me.

  It was Nolo’s turn to laugh. “Oh, look what you forgot to tell little sister.” Ilya made a face. “Nothing to tell,” he said, then he turned to me. “You know the old joke, yes?”

  I shook my head. No, I didn’t.

  So he told it to me. A lord, showing a visitor around his castle, points out a large framed painting and says it is a portrait of his dear departed wife. “I am so sorry,” the visitor says. “When did your wife die?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say she died,” the lord says. “I just said she departed.” Ilya laughed. Nolo didn’t.

  “She left?” I asked Ilya. “Just left?” He didn’t answer.

  Jacques brushed off his hands on his coveralls and stood up. “Speaking of wives, it’s home for me. Don’t forget to tie down the tarps.” He wagged a finger at Nolo as if this were a sore point. “Good and tight.” Then he got his gear and jumped off onto the quay. “No tours tomorrow, boys,” he said. “See you Wednesday.”

  “No tours,” Nolo said, shaking his head. “Man, I could use that money. He should buy more ads, put some investment in this tub. I mean, I’m depending on a good season. I got things I need.” He stomped off to get the tarps.

  “Jacques owns the boat?”

  Ilya nodded. “Jacques used to work on the canal when it was real work. For him, this is more like retirement. Nolo, he wants more.” Ilya watched his friend muttering, dragging the heavy blue canvas over the benches where the rows of tourists sat for their trip up the canal. “If he were careful with his money, he could buy Jacques out. But most days he thinks if Kumé, his girl, makes it big as a singer, he’ll leave all this behind.”

  “She was the one who sang the other night?” He nodded. “You wouldn’t want to own part of the boat?” I asked him.

  Ilya laughed, “Me? The boy our mother raised to be such a good communist? I don’t think so.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  He made a sour face. “I want to help Nolo get those tarps right for once, then get out of here.”

  I gathered up the banana skins, the empty wine bottle, the chocolate wrapper. I heard Nolo and Ilya behind me cursing and wresting with the tarp
s. “Vera!” I heard Ilya call. I turned. He had the long pole he used to steady the boat in the lock. “Jump,” he said, and he swung the pole in a low arc across the deck of the boat, aiming for my ankles. I jumped, clearing the pole by a good foot. “See,” he said to Nolo, “she can move her feet.”

  Nolo shook his head. “You are going to get me in trouble with your sister, friend. Leave me out of this.” He finished the last knot on the tarp.

  Ilya turned to me. “Nolo says you walk like this.” Ilya dragged his feet across the deck of the boat as if imitating someone wearing concrete overshoes.

  “I went dancing,” I said. “Nolo saw me dancing.” Nolo voted himself out of the argument by leaving the boat. He waved as he started down the quay.

  “Wednesday!” he said.

  “You never picked up your feet, even when you were dancing,” Ilya said. He swung the pole, faster this time. “Jump!” I didn’t, and he caught me smartly across the ankle.

  “Damn you,” I said, hopping on one foot, holding the other where I could feel a good bruise rising. “Stop it. I can’t help it if I’m less graceful than you are. I’m a klutz. I have always been a klutz. Leave me alone.”

  Ilya came up beside me, taking my elbow to help me balance. “No, you aren’t. You just think you are. Those people,” he said, and by that I knew he meant my American parents, “those people, they put lead in your blood. Remember,” he was whispering in my ear now, his voice suddenly fierce. “Never be afraid.”

  I looked at him, so shocked I didn’t know what to say, except, “Michel Strogoff.” He knew what part of the film I was meant to see.

  “Come on.” He grabbed the violin case. “I’ve got an idea.”

  We took the Metro to a neighborhood where I had never been before. We were walking by a big lycée with an endless line of chained bicycles, when my curiosity—okay, my impatience—finally got the better of me. I asked my brother, “Where in the world are we headed?”