“How old is she?” I asked.
“Fourteen.” Six years older than Julia. I remembered Ilya saying that at least Julia had had eight years. I’d been sorry for all the things she wouldn’t get to do, but Ilya must have thought of all the things Julia had done—crawling, walking, running, talking, reading—that Anne-Sophie never would. Ilya was still standing in front of the glass wall, his hands limp at his sides. “Why can’t he go in?” I asked. “He’s her father.”
“He used to go in,” she said, “but now she has seizures whenever anyone goes near her. Still, he comes. He was here for hours last night.” She shrugged. “The doctors have tried every medication. They can’t control the seizures. Each attack does more damage to her brain.”
I looked at her, and she saw my doubts.
“I know, I know, she never had more than the mind of a two-month-old at best. But she could see.”
I sat down on the empty beds behind me. She was blind. God, even that.
The sister looked down at me. “Now, the littlest sound or change sets her off. The nursing sisters have to go in at the same time, try to do any procedures quickly. Impossible, but … what can we do? The doctors say she won’t be with us much longer.”
Now Ilya was standing with his hands raised as if they were pressed to the glass, but he was a good two feet away and not actually touching the partition, not daring to risk even that noise. He was Mosjoukine standing in the storm in The Late Mathias Pascal with his dead daughter in his arms or Mosjoukine on the balcony in L’Enfant du Carnaval crying out for his lost child. Unlike Mosjoukine, Ilya wasn’t acting. Looking at my brother, I felt what he felt. It was a red hot saber. It was much worse than that.
“You know,” the young nun said, looking from Anne-Sophie’s glowing cube toward the other rooms, “once they are baptized, these little ones are without sin. They are saints, really. I try to remember that. They suffer for our sins.” She bowed her head.
I had an impulse to punch her in her small nose, to see blood streak her wimple. But then why did I want to insist that Anne-Sophie and the other children suffered for no reason? Or for no reason but that their parents had been stupid? Maybe not even that. Insist they suffered because the universe was unrelentingly, remorselessly cruel? These nuns took care of these children every day. I thought of the nun down the hall stroking the boy’s hair, saying, “Look at the pretty lady!” with no hope of reply. They thought they were blessed to do it. I had spent enough time at the state hospital to know how rare that kind of care was. Who did it hurt if they needed to believe it was all part of God’s great plan?
Maybe it was just my fatigue, my arriving at the far end of my nerves, but the light from Anne-Sophie’s cube flowed across the floor like liquid gold. What if love was not an abstraction but a fluid, clearer, more viscous than blood? Then maybe my care and love for my own daughter—the oatmeal, the hot baths—had flowed out into the universe and continued to circulate even now that Julia was gone, keeping a child in some cold place like Siberia safe and warm. Maybe, I thought, wanting to believe it. Maybe.
The Mother Superior put her hand on Ilya’s shoulder, whispered something in his ear. He shook his head. She whispered again. This time he nodded, and she led him away, holding his arm as carefully as if he, too, had been struck blind.
The young nun gestured toward the door. “You can wait for him on the first floor. She has some papers for him to sign.”
I descended the marble stairs alone, sat on a divan near the old men playing dominoes. Each click of a tile made me jump, as if it was the tip of an épée touching my bare skin.
After maybe a half hour, Ilya came down. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t even seem to see me. I followed him onto the street, walking a few feet behind him. When we reached the boulevard, he noticed I was missing. He stopped and waited for me to catch up. “What were you doing back there?” he said. “Your shoe come untied?” He looked down at my boots. I thought he might laugh—or that he expected me to—but he let it go.
“Why …” I started. He raised his hand, like he might actually strike me, but I didn’t stop. “Why didn’t you go back to fencing?” He looked at me, decided that was a question he could allow. He let his hand drop.
“I got sick,” he said, “after Barbara left.” He said sick, and I thought sick with grief. I thought breakdown, remembering the photo of him with hair as butchered as mine. “By the time I was well, I was out of contention.”
“You could have trained again, right? Started over. Georges still fences.”
Ilya blew air out through his pursed lips in that French gesture of complete dismissal. I could tell what he thought of both Georges still competing and competition itself. “It’s a game,” my brother said. “It’s only a game. Being sick taught me that. You saw the blunt tips on the épées. How can it be real if nobody dies?”
13
We went back to the apartment. The neighbor, wise woman, was not outside as we passed. By the time Ilya unlocked the top door, I was asleep in my boots. After the fencing lesson and the visit to the nursing home, I was numb and tired clear through, muscles, heart, and brain.
I wished my brother goodnight, keeping my promise not to ask anything out of bounds like, Will you be okay? He’d been okay for forty-two years. Who was I to presume otherwise now? I’d run from the Place Ste-Odile and into the colonel’s arms that morning so long ago, abandoning Ilya, without a second’s hesitation. I hadn’t been with him when he was uprooted and moved to Czechoslovakia by our mother. I hadn’t been at the hospital with Ilya when Mosjoukine left never to return. I had been growing up in Florida, in a bedroom full of Barbies, in a house surrounded by tangerine trees. I hadn’t driven with him to Prague to find our mother already dead and gone for a year. I hadn’t been there when Anne-Sophie was born or at any difficult moment of the fourteen years of her life. I had gotten married and had my own daughter by caesarian section and not even under the truth serum of anesthesia had I remembered, or even dreamed about, my lost brother. I pulled off my boots sitting on the bed, then fell backward onto the feather mountain of pillows. I was asleep before I could take off my socks.
I dreamed I was riding in the carriage in Michel Strogoff, sitting next to Mosjoukine in Nadia’s place. Just as in the movie, we were riding through a terrible storm, with the horses running mad through dark, whipping trees.
I was waiting for Mosjoukine to reassure me, to stand holding the reins in one hand and tell me, Never be afraid. Instead, he turned toward me slowly, as if the film were running at half speed. “Watch out, little Vera,” he said. “It isn’t the end yet.” Then a tree came crashing down in front of the carriage, and I was watching the movie again. Nadia was back on the seat next to the dashing Strogoff, secret courier for his czar. Someone was shouting. Gradually I realized it was not in my dream but outside my window, in the courtyard. One of the voices was my brother’s.
I jumped out of bed and opened the curtain. It was still dark, but I could see Ilya in the light from the lamp over the passageway. He was standing talking to the neighbor, waving his arms. She stood with her hands on her hips. I thought about his joke with the knife in the kitchen, about Ilya swinging the barge pole at my feet. After what he had told me about Barbara’s addiction, I was afraid. I opened the window. “Ilya?” I called. He turned, looked up to see where my voice was coming from.
“It’s okay,” he said, waving me away. “There’s nothing going on. Go back to bed.” The neighbor sat down on her chair and crossed her thick arms across her broad chest. She didn’t seem worried she was about to be murdered. Still I wanted him upstairs, away from the spider.
“The telephone is ringing,” I said, lying. He looked up again. Then suddenly it was.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t answer it,” he said. “I’ll be right up.”
I ran for the kitchen anyway, slipping across the linoleum in my socks. My heart was pounding, partly because of my adrenal
ine dash out of my dream, but also because I had never heard Ilya’s antique telephone ring. I hadn’t known it was connected.
Ilya bounded up the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen. He grabbed the black handset off its hook and held it hard against his right ear as if the message might be coming from a very long way off. He leaned his back against the kitchen wall, panting hard, trying to catch his breath. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Sister. Of course. No, no, I understand.” Just that, then he hung up and slid down the wall onto the linoleum. He sat there, his hands in his lap. I knew without hearing the nun on the other end of the line that Anne-Sophie had not made it through the night.
“Ilya?”
“Go to bed,” he said. He looked up at me as if he were afraid I might hit him, that I might say those most unforgivable, most painful words—Anne-Sophie. “Please.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
In bed, I lay listening to Ilya coughing in the kitchen. Then I heard banging, the rustling of paper. Once I thought I heard a faint sound of breaking glass. But I stayed in bed, made my eyes close. I wanted to know if he was all right, but if I couldn’t mention Anne-Sophie, if we couldn’t talk about the news that she was dead, how was I supposed to ask? The nun who called wouldn’t have said dead, I thought. Surely, she said on the phone that Anne-Sophie was with her Savior at last.
I woke early and headed for the bathroom, still half asleep. In the light of morning, nothing about the night before seemed real. In the living room, I noticed that all, not just some, of the picture frames were empty. I was puzzled. Where were the photographs? The TV and video deck were still on the floor, but the tapes of Mosjoukine’s movies were gone. I padded into the kitchen in my socks. The bathroom door was shut, and I could hear running water. It seemed like a good sign that Ilya was up and getting ready for another day. I knocked, then waited. I really had to pee. I knocked again. No answer. “Ilya! It’s Vera. I’m waiting my turn.” This must be what it was like having a real brother, one you grew up with, waiting for the bathroom, wondering if you should knock politely again or kick on the door.
I turned to see if Ilya had started the coffee, thinking if not, I might as well. On the table were two shopping bags, the kind with the waxed string handles they gave you when you bought something heavy or awkward like my boots. I peeked inside. In one were all the tapes of our father’s movies and in the other were all the photographs, stacked together, neatly removed from their frames. On top I could see the snapshot of Sophie with Ilya and me. Under that was Mosjoukine as Father Sergius. So that was what I had heard last night, the rustle, the broken glass. What was Ilya up to? What, exactly, did these bags full of Mosjoukine mean?
The lock clicked, and Ilya came out, his hair wet around his face where he’d splashed it with water, his eyes sleepy. I pointed to the bags on the table. “What’s all this?”
He didn’t seem to hear. He brushed by and got the coffee pot out of the sink.
I still had to pee. So I went in for my turn in the bathroom. The coffee would be ready in just a few minutes, but I didn’t feel like hurrying if Ilya wasn’t speaking to me. This, too, was what real brothers and sisters were like, to judge by Aunt Z and Livvy. It wasn’t like Aunt Z was a peach or Livvy was easy to live with. Still, Livvy had called her sister that last morning of her life, wanting to make that connection—blood to blood, sibling to sibling—one last time. Now Ilya and I had a death to talk about. I just hadn’t had enough time with Ilya to know what to say. So I took the time for a hose bath, washed my hair, then put my stolen clothes back on. My bare arms were cold in the early morning damp of the old house. Ilya’s blue sweater was hanging on the back of the bathroom door, so I pulled it on.
As I did, I saw a flash of white in the trash can by the toilet. I reached down and picked it up, the way a magpie will if something catches its eye. It was a small square of butcher paper, the same kind the neighbor used to wrap pharmaceuticals for her customers. I moved the tissues below it aside with one cautious finger, my heart careening in my chest. At the bottom of the can, I found what I was most afraid that I would find: a used, disposable hypodermic and an empty glass vial. Morphine sulfate, the label read.
I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. This was why he’d been with the neighbor last night. He’d been buying this from her. Why? Why? How long had he been using the same poison that had almost killed his wife and had killed his daughter, though it had taken all these years? My brother, who was so thin and ate so little, was an addict just like Barbara had been. The topic of Anne-Sophie might be forbidden, but we would have to talk about this.
I couldn’t bring myself to touch the vial or the syringe. I made myself pick up the paper. That would be enough. When I opened the door, Ilya looked up, steaming coffee pot in one hand. He saw what I was holding out in front of me. Then, in one fluid motion, with that grace he alone really shared with our father, he threw the pot and sent hot coffee hurtling across the kitchen, crashing into the wall next to my head.
“Jesus, Ilya.”
He stood with his arms wrapped around his chest, breathing so hard he was wheezing. “I want you out,” he said. “I packed everything.” He nodded at the shopping bags on the table. I stared at them, letting what he’d said take a minute to sink in. Even last night, he’d been planning this. Even last night, he had wanted me gone. “Go now,” he said. His jaw barely moved when he said this. His face was rigid, his breathing labored.
“I …”
“Now,” my brother repeated.
Then I was angry, too. I’d done nothing to deserve this. I’d lost a daughter, too. A husband. My whole family. Had he forgotten? What a bastard. What a prick. I banged open the door to the bathroom. Inside, I pulled on my boots. I got my purse from the living room and slung it over my right shoulder with such force that it bounced off my backbone hard enough to hurt. Then I grabbed the two shopping bags. Ilya hadn’t moved. I took a deep breath. “But you’re my brother.”
“Leave the keys,” he said. I dug them from my purse and slapped them on the kitchen table. “And the sweater.” I yanked it off and threw it on the table beside the heavy brass door keys. It slid, with a lonely swoosh, onto the linoleum.
“Ilya, you can’t keep …”
“Don’t,” he said. He held up his hand, palm out, the universal symbol for stop now.
I couldn’t. I said, “I’ll go, but I want you to know. I’m coming back.” My brother. My bastard only brother.
“Don’t,” he said again, but sagging a little this time, putting one hand on the stove to hold himself up.
“Shall I let myself out?” I heard myself saying next, as if this were a drawing room drama played out on a musty provincial stage.
“Please,” he said, so softly I hardly heard him.
As soon as I was on the stairs, I heard Ilya lock the door behind me. By locking me out of our father’s apartment, he was cutting me off, the way our mother had cut herself off from Mosjoukine. Damn family history, so much pathetic and tedious repetition. I stood facing the front door and thought about banging on it, the way I had on the bathroom door. But that wouldn’t do me any good. Later I would find Nolo. He would care. He would help me figure out what to do.
Someone was watching me. I turned. The neighbor was peering out from her front window, safe behind glass. She shook her head as if she disapproved of me, as if she disapproved of everything about the people who lived in 44 Place Ste-Odile. At that moment, so did I.
14
I took the metro to the hÔtel batignolles. Since I was paying for a room to store an empty suitcase and a couple of extra credit cards, I felt I might was well stash all my Mosjoukine loot there, too. I waited while the clerk checked for messages, though I had no reason to expect any, since no one knew I was staying there. There were none, the clerk said, handing me my room key. The clerk didn’t seem surprised to see me. I’d only been gone three—or was it four?—days. So little time. It had been Friday when I arrived in
Paris. What day was it now?
I asked the clerk. He blinked twice, registering more surprise at my question than he intended, then he answered smoothly, “Tuesday, Madame.”
“Tuesday,” I repeated. I had promised John I would call on Tuesday.
“Is there anything else we can do for you, Madame?” the clerk asked.
“No,” I said, “but thank you for asking,” and left it at that.
By the time I reached my room, I’d decided I would call John. That was something I could do. I called from the phone by my bed, asking the clerk to put the international call through, knowing that it was both the easiest and most expensive way. Another charge on my card at this point wouldn’t make any difference.
I tried John’s office, but as it rang and rang I realized it was two in the morning back home. I stretched out on the bed, turned on the black-and-white TV. The world was still there. As usual, there was a war on. Always, things fall apart, I could have sworn I heard the French news announcer say. I managed to make myself wait until noon. Then I called John and woke him up.
“Good God, Emma, it’s five in the morning here! What’s wrong?”
I thought about lying. I thought about telling the truth. I picked a middle ground. “My niece died, John,” I said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a niece.” I could hear him fumbling for the light or maybe his glasses. “Was she in France?”
“Yes,” I said, “in Paris.” Then I felt guilty. I was breaking my promise to Ilya. “John?”
“Yes?”
“Wasn’t I supposed to call you today?”
“Well, actually, I think we said tomorrow. Unless it’s a day later where you are.”
“No,” I said, “not in Paris.”
“Good,” John said, yawning so hard I heard his jaws crack. “Glad we settled that. Listen, I haven’t been able to get anywhere with the Cinémathèque Française. I am supposed to call them again today. I was going to wait until I got to the office, and I have my big lecture this morning. Then tonight there’s a screening for the class. We’re watching Rashomon. Can I call you back?”
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 16
