“I’ll call you, John.”
“Listen, Emma. This is crazy. Where are you staying? Can’t you at least tell me that?”
I almost said, “44 Place Ste-Odile.” Then I thought, I’ll give you the address, but just try and find it. Except now that isn’t true, if it ever had been. My brother has thrown me out.
“I’m at the Hôtel Batignolles,” I said.
“Ah, the Batignolles.” John sounded relieved. He, along with half the faculty, had stayed there. “Good, then I can reach you if I have time this afternoon between the class and the screening. If I find something else that might be useful. Otherwise, it will be post Rashomon.”
“I’ll try to stay put,” I said. Already I was restless. I wanted to find Nolo. I had to talk to Ilya, make him listen. He had to stop taking morphine. “But if I am out, you can leave a message.”
“Do you have to go to your niece’s funeral?”
“Funeral?” I hadn’t thought of that. I imagined Ilya at Anne-Sophie’s funeral this morning surrounded only by nuns. “I don’t know. I don’t know the arrangements yet. Listen, John, this is costing me a fortune.” I wanted to appeal to the miser I suspected lay in the hearts of all men. I was wrong.
“Your father was cheap, Emma,” John said. “Ben was cheap. Not me. That’s why you should let me call you back. That’s why you should have married me when you had the chance.” We were both silent for a moment, racking up the overseas charges. This was a lie and the truth, in complicated proportions. John had never asked me because we both knew I would have said no. For some reason I couldn’t quite remember now, I hadn’t wanted to be someone’s third wife. Then I’d met Ben, and John had met wife three. Now even the smallest allotment of marital bliss seemed like water in the desert. I bit my lip to keep from sobbing or cursing. I honestly wasn’t sure what sound was welling up in my throat. “Tricia sends her love,” John said, saving us both more time hanging foolishly on the line.
“Give her mine,” I said, hanging up. There was a terrible metallic taste in my mouth, as if I’d been sucking on old pennies. Was that the taste of regret? Not over John. Over Ilya. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth. I brushed again. It didn’t help.
After that I called information, trying to get a listing for Ilya’s number. The ancient phone had rung. There was no listing for an Adrien Meis or an Ilya or Ivan Desnos, or an Ivan or I. I. Mosjoukine at any address, let alone at 44 Place Ste-Odile. Then I remembered there were no cruises today. So how was I going to find Nolo? I would go by the building where he’d had his party and try to find him that way. The dance party had seemed like a regular thing. Nolo and I would bang on Ilya’s door until either the neighbor called the cops—something she would be reluctant to do—or my brother let us in. If I couldn’t find Nolo, I would beat on Ilya’s door by myself. But Nolo would not be hosting a dance party at noon.
I lay down on the bed on my back, crossed my ankles, and closed my eyes.
The phone rang an hour later. John must have called as soon as he got to the office. He sounded businesslike, as if he’d purposely left his office door open or a student or colleague was sitting on the other side of his desk. “No luck yet with the Cinémathèque, but there’s a private collector, a film scholar. She said if you go to her apartment—she works at home—she thinks she can show you some Mosjoukine material. I’m not sure she has much, though. She said she was glad to do it for your husband.”
“For my husband?”
“You told me you were finishing Ben’s last book. She knew him, of course. So if you were, well, fudging a little, be careful what you say to her. She told me she had no idea he was working on Mosjoukine. She said she was very surprised to hear it.”
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure I had any reason to go see this film scholar who sounded jealous of Ben. “I’ll be careful.” I wrote down her name and phone number.
I had two bags full of Mosjoukine beside me on my bed. What more could she show me? But I couldn’t think of anything else to keep me busy until the evening, so I called the film scholar working at home. She sounded charmed to hear from me. Yes, yes, I should come over. She would be happy to be as much help, under difficult circumstances, as she possibly could. She gave me directions to her apartment in the Marais. I pulled on the heavy black turtleneck I’d worn over on the plane. Compared to the stolen sweater I’d lost, or even Ilya’s old blue one, it felt like a hair shirt. It felt like a punishment I didn’t quite deserve.
I took a cab for no reason except I couldn’t bear to be underground on the day when Anne-Sophie might or might not be buried. The film scholar welcomed me. She was probably in her sixties, though her hair was dyed an inky black and she was tiny, barely five feet. A pair of heavy, fiercely intellectual black-rimmed glasses balanced on her upturned nose. She looked like a librarian elf. Or maybe a French Marxist librarian elf. She kissed me on both cheeks. She was sorry, so sorry about my husband. Such a shock. She didn’t mention Julia, and I didn’t either, unsure whether John had not told her or whether she felt any mention of my daughter’s death would be an unprofessional intrusion into my husband’s personal life.
She led me into her living room, which was buried in books and equipment. It looked just like Ben’s study. “I really don’t have much on Mosjoukine,” she apologized, pushing the glasses up on top of her head. “I thought I had more when I talked to John, honestly I did. Today, all I could find is a print of Casanova. It has the stencil tinted sequences, though. Have you seen those? Very lovely.”
She set up the film for me on a Steenbeck, the film viewer that archives and scholars use because it doesn’t stress the delicate emulsions on the old films. Watching a film on one was always like watching a movie in the world’s smallest theater on the world’s tiniest screen. The film scholar’s Steenbeck was in one corner of what had been a kitchen, where the stove should have been. Maybe she spent her life eating out or dining with friends.
Then she left me alone in the kitchen to watch Casanova, in which my father made love to all the women in the world, or nearly. It was a beautiful print, a beautiful film, set in Venice during the carnival. Mosjoukine, from his powdered wig to his white shapely calves, pirouetted throughout the film, as if he had never been so happy, in love with woman after woman after woman. That was the plot, basically. He watches a sword dance performed by women artistically removing their clothes, then he carries the most beautiful from the room. All in all, the women he loved and left took it well, thinking it a wonderful part of life’s game. Except the one who retired to a convent. I couldn’t help but think of her as Sophie, gone off to seek paradise in Prague. In the final scene, Mosjoukine bids a tearful farewell to a girl he has rescued from her wicked guardian, and he does it with the tears for which he was famous, only to turn and see another woman on the ship he is about to board. His face lights up instantly with love as if the sun has come out from behind a dark bank of clouds.
In this, I found myself thinking, my father was like God—who, as a Father, is said to love all His children impartially. But in that case, it wasn’t exactly like Mosjoukine loved me, was it? Or would have loved me, if he’d had the chance? Most of all, watching Mosjoukine reminded me of my brother, so mercurial and graceful, my brother who I was worried about, who I wanted to see. I looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was five, still too early for catching Nolo, but probably time to leave the film scholar to her private life.
I rewound the film, put it back in the can, and wandered into the living room to find the film scholar peering over her glasses at the contents of a folder. “Ah,” she said. “There you are. I was just looking through my files. I thought I had some more Mosjoukine material here. Maybe some interviews with surviving actors from Albatross. But all I found are these,” she laughed, holding up two pieces of paper. “Such strange things to have together in one file.” She handed me the first, a yellowing section of newsprint. It was a page in Russian. There were ads, a couple o
f smeary black-and-white pictures. “It’s from a paper put out by the Russian exiles,” she said. She took off her glasses and tapped the page with the frames. “An obituary for Mosjoukine.”
I looked more closely. I couldn’t read a word of the text, but there was a photograph of Mosjoukine in a bed looking very thin, very ill.
“I would guess that’s from the hospital where he died,” the film scholar said. I nodded. I had no intention of telling her that Mosjoukine had, as if commanded by Jesus, taken up his bed and walked right out of the hospital and into a much longer life.
“The other is this,” she tapped her glasses on the second paper. “I get the craziest mail.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Oh,” she rolled her eyes. “It’s a letter from a film student in Moscow claiming to have seen Ivan Mosjoukine alive and well as of,” she glanced at the page in her hand, “April of last year.”
“In Moscow? The letter’s from Moscow?”
She nodded. “It says Mosjoukine is in a Russian orthodox monastery outside the city somewhere.” She made the poofing gesture with her lips, dismissing the idea. She slipped her glasses back on. “Ridiculous, Mosjoukine died in …”
I finished her sentence. “1939.”
“When he was, what?”
“Forty-nine,” I said.
“So if he were alive now, he would be,” she paused doing the math. I let her. I was thinking Moscow. She laughed again. “He would be 112.”
That stopped me. I heard Ilya’s voice: Then one day I counted up the years and realized the son of a bitch must be dead.
“Could I have a copy of the letter? I’m interested in how strongly people identify with dead film stars, with someone they’ve only seen in movies, never in real life.” I was babbling. I was talking about me. She pursed her lips as if considering this, then nodded, Why not? And went off to the kitchen to the copier I’d seen next to the sink where a refrigerator should have been.
She gave me the copy of the letter, as warm as if she had just popped it out of the toaster. She gave me her card. She slipped off her glasses again, and we kissed cheeks.
I waited until I was outside to read the letter. It was in French:
DEAR MADAME:
I saw your short article on the films of Ivan Mosjoukine, the great Russian silent film actor, and I thought you might want to send a researcher to Moscow to interview him. He is living under the name of Father Ivan at the Monastery of St. Stefan and receives visitors on Thursdays and Fridays from noon until two. I happened to go to the monastery with my grandmother and recognized him at once. I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity. If you need any assistance, please feel free to contact me.
I also thought you might be interested in this poem by the constructivist artist and filmmaker Vladimir Mayakovsky, which records the reaction of the new Soviet filmmakers to the old style, prerevolutionary Russian cinema. Personally, I cannot agree with his assessment of Mosjoukine.
Cinema and cinema
For you, cinema is a spectacle.
For me, it is a design of the world.
Cinema is the vehicle of movement.
Cinema is the innovator of literature.
Cinema is the destroyer of aesthetics.
Cinema is intrepid.
Cinema is a sportsman.
Cinema is the diffuser of ideas.
But the cinema is sick. Capitalism threw gold dust in its eyes. Cunning contractors parade it through the streets. Pile up money by stirring the heart with tiny weepy plots.
That must end.
Communism must tear the cinema from the hands of the speculators.
Futurism must evaporate the stagnant water of slowness and false morality.
If not, we will have more imported slapstick from America or the eternally tearful eyes of Mosjoukine.
Of these two, the first annoys us.
The second is even worse.
A poem by Mayakovsky insulting Mosjoukine. I wondered if Sophie had ever seen it. I had never imagined the Red cinema of the future firing a salvo at a different sort of reigning czar. But I was more interested in the present. I turned over the letter. There was no return address, and the film scholar hadn’t offered an envelope. Even the signature, which must have been on a second page, was missing. Could Mosjoukine possibly be alive? Or was what I had said to the film scholar true—this was a person too interested in Mosjoukine for his own good. Someone like you, I imagined Ilya saying.
The Mayakovsky poem reminded me of something I’d forgotten until then, a much better known bit of film history, one still taught in every beginning film class as the Kuleshov Effect.
The Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov had taken stock footage of a bowl of soup, a dead child, and a beautiful, nearly naked woman and spliced them in after close-ups of an actor’s face. The actor, I remembered now, had been Ivan Mosjoukine. Then Kuleshov showed the clips to audiences who were convinced Mosjoukine’s unchanging face conveyed completely different emotions depending on the image that followed, saying he was starving, grief-stricken, or full of lust and longing. According to Kuleshov, it proved that editing was king, that the film editor controlled the audience. Acting was dead. That actor, the dead one, had been the great Mosjoukine.
Was he dead now? He hadn’t been in 1939, I knew that much. He’d gotten my mother pregnant in 1959 and had abandoned Ilya in 1972. Kuleshov was right in one way. Context was everything. I looked at Mosjoukine in his films and saw what I needed to see: a loving father. As an observer, I couldn’t be trusted. I looked at the letter again. Was it that I needed to find him alive or at least believe he might be? The Monastery of St. Stefan. Moscow. Impossible, but I had to go and see. Not only that, but I wanted Ilya to go with me.
15
I went straight to 44 place ste-odile, ready to bang with knuckle, fist, and boot on the door. But I didn’t have to. Ilya had just come home and was unlocking the front door as I crossed the courtyard. He heard me but didn’t turn around. We’d played in this courtyard as children. We were here still. I wanted to play again, to be Ilya’s adored little sister. I put my hands over his eyes. “Guess who?” I said.
“Emma,” Ilya said. I flinched. Siblings knew where to stick the knife, where the soft underbelly was hidden, but you had to be tough and take that.
“Ouch,” I said, making a joke of it, trying to keep this light enough to charm my way through the door and up the stairs. “But wrong.” I didn’t move my hands. Ilya was feeling around for the doorknob, trying to fit the key into the lock. I pressed my thumbs, hard, against his eyes.
“Vera?” he said this time.
“Bingo,” I said. He lifted my hands from his eyes. He turned around, letting my left hand drop, holding my right hand in his. He looked awful. A blood vessel had burst in one eye, and the red had spread across the white next to the deep blue of his iris, spread too far for me to have just done it with my thumbs. He saw me looking at it and shrugged.
“The tricolor,” he said, meaning the French flag: blue, white, and red.
“Are you angry that I came back?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “But it would have been better for both of us if you hadn’t. You should have flown home to America on the next plane. After yesterday, anyone with sense would have.”, “I’m your twin sister. You can’t expect me to have more sense than you do.”
He frowned. “You should never have come to Paris.” He sounded like Apolline.
I shook my head. “Once you start that, the regrets never stop. Maybe it would have been better if we’d never been born.”
“Don’t say that,” Ilya said. He squeezed my fingers, let them drop. “Be glad you’re alive. I am.”
“In spite of everything?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I still wish you’d gone home.”
Then he let me come upstairs, a greater concession than our mother had granted our father. We went into the kitchen. The coffee pot was back on the stove, although the
wall by the bathroom still boasted a long rusty brown stain. Ilya opened a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass.
I thought about it, then broke his rule about not mentioning Anne-Sophie. I risked a glass of wine in the face, another trip down the stairs and back to the Hôtel Batignolles. “Was there a funeral?” I asked. “Or will there be?”
Ilya didn’t throw anything, just shook his head. “I signed the papers for the Mother Superior,” he said. He took a deep breath. “They baptized her; they cared for her. They want to bury her in the cemetery with their order of nuns. She belonged to them, really. Not me.”
“Did someone tell her mother?”
“Barbara?” he said. “Yes, I called this morning. The nuns had her number.”
“What did she say?”
Ilya raised one shoulder, let it drop, then did it again as if one shrug in a case like this could never be enough. “She said she appreciated my letting her know.” He took a long drink of his wine. “She said she hadn’t realized Anne-Sophie was still alive. Such a long time, she said. Unusual.” He filled his glass again.
“What a bitch,” I said. “How could she not have known her daughter was alive?”
Ilya waved a hand, like Ben had after my parents’ deaths. Let it go, let it go.
“Bitch,” I said again, because he wouldn’t. Then I fixed us dinner, though Ilya was suspicious of what I put on his plate. “It isn’t an omelet,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “It’s scrambled eggs. In America, we make them this way on purpose.” Then, when we were done, I showed him my copy of the letter the film scholar had found.
He read it, handed it back to me. “That’s interesting,” he said.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 17
