“Interesting, as in that’s unbelievable because no one lives to be 112? Or interesting, as in you think it’s true and that’s our dear old dad?”
“At the home where Anne-Sophie lives,” he corrected himself, “lived, there’s a woman who’s 114. I don’t think she’s even the oldest woman in France. But Mosjoukine isn’t 112. He told me he lied about his age when he ran away from home to act on the stage. He added ten years to his age. He didn’t want juvenile roles; he wanted to play serious parts. So he’s only 102.”
“Then you think it might be true?”
“No, I don’t. Mosjoukine has been dead for years. I’m certain of it. Otherwise, he would have turned up here. He was a man of habit, our father.” Ilya sighed. “Want to risk coffee?” he asked me. “I promise not to throw it at your head.”
“Okay,” I said, though this reminded me of the syringe in the trash can. It reminded him, too. “We still need to talk about that, you know.”
Ilya looked at me with his lips pursed, his eyes narrowed, that expression you see on Parisian faces at the market as they size up the worth of a chicken, the freshness of an artichoke. Then he said, “All right, little sister, but later. First, what do you want to do about this letter?”
“Go to Moscow,” I said. “And I want you to go with me.”
“No,” Ilya said, without a second’s hesitation. He was adding the ground coffee to the bent pot. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“Mosjoukine’s dead. I told you that. Even if he isn’t—and he is—he’s dead to me. If he sent me a postcard, a birthday card, an engraved invitation to Moscow, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
Postcard. The word tickled something in the very back of my head. I went to the living room to get my purse and dug out Apolline’s postcard of Mosjoukine. The photo, I recognized now, was from about the same year as L’Enfant du Carnaval, 1925, maybe 1926. I’d assumed it was a souvenir Mosjoukine had sent to Apolline or maybe to Sophie, who had, in turn, passed it on to her when they were roommates. I turned the card over.
Now I could recognize my father’s handwriting, the same huge looping letters of the autographs on the photos, Ivan Mosjoukine. But it was still a puzzle trying to make out the words of the message, the letters so large and stylized. Bonne Année, I decided. Happy New Year. The card had no other greeting or salutation, no Dear Apolline or My Sophie. Also no address. The message and signature filled the entire back, so if it had ever been mailed, it must have been sent in an envelope, maybe along with a letter. But it did have a date. I looked closer, thought I could make out a looping 2 0 0 0. I blinked, but the numbers stayed the same, which meant the card had been written by Mosjoukine—not in 1926 or even 1957, the year of our conception—but just last year. Sent, I was guessing, from Moscow to New York, as a New Year’s greeting from an old friend.
If so, Apolline had known all along Mosjoukine was alive and well in Russia. She had kept her mouth shut, just as she had about the existence of my twin brother. Instead, she sent me after Sophie. I took the card into the kitchen, showed it to Ilya. “Why would she do that?” I said. “Not tell me this came from Moscow last year?”
“If it did,” Ilya said. He flipped the card onto the table. “She wouldn’t want you going there any more than I do. What do you think you’ll find? A senile old man who shouts, Girl, come closer! Do you think he is going to remember who you are? Who you are out of all the children he fathered? You’re going to get your heart broken. Either that, or you will find out this Father Ivan is some total stranger and find out that Mosjoukine has been dead thirty years. Is that what you want? More weeping? More ghosts standing next to you when the next gypsy reads your fortune?”
“No,” I said, leaving the card of Mosjoukine where it lay on the table, but doubling my bet. “I just want an ending. Come with me. We might find him alive. We might find him dead. You, Ivan Ilyich Desnos, can spit on his grave or in his old wrinkled face if that’s what you want. Then it will be over. I promise it will be over. I promise to turn my face to the future and never look back.”
“You promise?” He sounded doubtful.
I crossed my heart. “And you can, too, Ilya. Start over. Please, brother, I can’t do this without you.”
He sighed. The coffee pot wheezed steam, boiling away on the stove. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you to Moscow. Besides, I’m not sure I trust you to make the trip by yourself, as crazy as you’ve been. But I won’t see him. You can do that part alone.”
“I could make the trip alone, Brother,” I said. “I just don’t want to. I found you. I can find him, if it is him. But you,” I reached across the table and took my only brother’s hand, “you can’t keep on with the morphine. You know where that will get you. You know.” I looked at him, but he was looking at the floor. “I don’t know how long you’ve been using it, but you have to stop.”
“Not long,” Ilya said, but faintly. “The morphine, not long at all. It will stop. I promise.” He took both my hands in his. “After Moscow.”
“After Moscow,” I said, and we shook on it.
16
“You have a credit card, yes?” my brother asked after we had finished our coffee.
“All Americans have credit cards.” I emphasized the plural. “Even the poor ones. Like Europeans have passports or identity cards. In America, you are your credit rating.”
Ilya raised an eyebrow. “So we can use one to buy plane tickets for Moscow? We should fly.”
“Yes,” I said. “We can do that.”
“Good. I have a friend, Pavel, in Moscow from my fencing days,” Ilya said. “We can stay at his place.”
I thought about Aunt Z. “I’d rather stay at a hotel.”
Ilya shrugged. It was my money. “Okay, he can arrange that, too. He has connections. He did in the old days, and he still does. He’s one of the coaches of their fencing team. He can advise us about the tickets and visas.”
“You still need a visa to go to Moscow?” I had imagined the wall of bureaucratic paperwork fallen along with the one in Berlin. “I can go anywhere in the EU without so much as showing my passport.”
“Russia is still Russia,” Ilya said. “Czar or commissar or capitalist—Russians don’t trust foreigners.”
Ilya put our coffee cups in the sink and went to the telephone to call his friend. Things had changed that much. In the Soviet days, Ilya hadn’t been able to get a letter through to our mother in Prague, let along ring her up from her old kitchen. “Pasha, my friend!” Ilya said, then added something in Russian, a language I could guess now he had learned in school in Czechoslovakia.
Then Ilya switched to French, and I listened as he asked how quickly we could get visas. Ilya nodded, listening to the answer. “I’ll check,” he said, covering the mouthpiece with one hand and turning to me. “Pavel says he knows a travel agent in Paris who can get us visas by tomorrow, but the overnight charge is five hundred euros.”
The price of a pair of Jean Gabot boots. “For both?”
“For each.” He looked at me, trying to read my face. After all, the trip was my idea. “Okay?”
In for a penny, in for a thousand euros. “Okay, then,” I said, nodding.
Ilya wrote down the address of the travel agent. “Okay, Pasha,” he said to his friend over the phone. “I’ll be in touch.” He hung up, coughing. He bent for a moment with his hands on his knees, then straightened up. “We’ll have to hurry. Our visa applications have to be done by eight.”
“I’m ready.”
Ilya ran his hands over his face. He looked pale, the circles under his eyes so dark they looked painful. “Give me a minute.”
He disappeared into the bathroom. I washed the cups and the coffee pot, splashing water in the sink to make him think I was too busy to know what he was doing. No more morphine after Moscow, he had promised, but first we had to get there.
When he came out of the bathroom, Ilya looked as if he’d had a blood transfu
sion instead of a syringe full of morphine, his color was so much better. He looked like my brother again, also like our father, that cat with nine lives. Ilya smiled, reborn for now. “Okay,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Visas.”
The travel agency was in Belleville, not far from where we’d gone to dance in Nolo’s basement. The windows were papered over with posters offering special rates on flights to the countries in Africa that had been French colonies and to Poland, Russia, and Vietnam, all the homelands of Paris’s working poor. Ilya opened the door, waved me in ahead of him.
The travel agent was on the phone and motioned for us to sit in the chairs across from her. I’d been expecting her to be Russian, but she was African, nearly as dark as Nolo, and she was beautiful, her head shaved and polished, her brown eyes the shape of a cat’s. When she hung up, she leaned across the desk and touched my brother’s hand lightly. I’d been slow to realize it, but this time it struck me how women were drawn to Ilya—Polish grandmothers, French tarot readers, and schoolteachers from Nice alike.
“I’m Ceci,” the travel agent announced. She nodded to me, then turned, smiling, to Ilya. “How do you know Pavel?” she asked him.
“We fenced together. Drank vodka together.”
Ceci laughed.
“And you?” my brother asked.
“Oh, I met him when I was in Moscow on scholarship. I’m from Angola. In the old days, I was a good Marxist. Or at least as good as I had to be.” She smiled at Ilya again, resting her white teeth on her dark red lower lip. She said something to him in Russian, and my brother, fellow child communist, said something back. They both laughed. I felt a sudden flush of irritation at being shut out.
I cleared my throat. “I assume I can charge the visas to my credit card as well as the plane tickets?” I said, realizing as I did that I was throwing my plastic money on the table to show who was in charge.
Ceci turned her lovely cat eyes in my direction. “Of course, dear,” she said. “But first, there is paperwork.” She looked at Ilya again, gave a little shrug of apology. “Always for Russia, there is paperwork.”
She left us at her desk with a stack of forms and two pens while she tapped away on a computer in the back, booking our flight.
“There’s no need to be jealous,” Ilya said.
“I’m not jealous,” I said. “You’re my brother.” Though as soon as Ilya said the word, I knew he’d put his finger on the absurd inappropriateness of what I’d been feeling. If he was channeling Mosjoukine, I was playing the possessive Sophie. And neither of us were our parents. I tapped my pen on the visa application. “Okay,” I said. “Point taken, but I just want us to get this done in time.”
The application was a long one, with questions still full of Soviet Cold War paranoia, such as “Do you have any specialized skills, training, or experience related to firearms, explosives, or nuclear, biological, or chemical activities?” Another asked for “Other names ever used (maiden, family, pen-name, stage name, holy orders, etc.)?” What would Mosjoukine have put down for that one?
Ilya held out his application so I could copy Pavel’s name as the person who was inviting us to Russia. I had circled “widowed” under marital status. I noticed Ilya circled “divorced.” After “Have you ever abused drugs or been a drug addict?” I saw he had firmly circled “No.” An even more heavily inked “No” followed “Do you have family in Russia? If so, who?”
I’d circled “No” for that one, too. A “Yes” seemed too complicated to explain (as in “my father—maybe”), but I felt guilty about it. Ilya, I suspected, did not.
“Good,” Ceci said, looking over the applications after she came back from the computer. Then she stood us against the wall and took Polaroid head shots of us. “Here are your tickets. I have you booked for an evening flight tomorrow, so let’s hope the embassy staff is wide awake tonight. With luck, we should have your visas by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Ilya said nothing. He looked tired.
“You are most welcome,” Ceci said. She shook my hand; then she kissed Ilya on both cheeks.
By the next afternoon, the visas were ready. Ceci phoned to say she was sending a messenger from the agency over with them. I took the call, then I let myself out and waited by the entrance to the Place Ste-Odile for fear he couldn’t find it. Ilya had gotten up early, then gone back to bed. All morning, I’d watched the neighbor through the living room window. She’d had customers, but Ilya, who I’d heard coughing off and on in his room, was not one of them.
When I got back to the apartment with the visas, Ilya was up and packing his rucksack with its usual load of bread, chocolate, and bananas. We had finished all the wine. He added a pair of jeans and a shirt. He watched as I put my clean underwear, socks, and toothbrush in my purse. It was getting to be a habit for me, this leaving one country for another with next to nothing. Ilya frowned at my purse-as-suitcase, then stuffed another pair of jeans in his pack. “That way we won’t fight over who gets the clean clothes,” he said, poking me in the ribs with one finger.
At five, Ilya and I left for the airport. I made us take a taxi. I said it was because our flight left in just a few hours, and it was a long way on the RER to Charles de Gaulle. Ilya was as pale as he had been that morning.
By eight, we were on the plane to Moscow. It was entirely too easy. No long, snaking lines. I said so to Ilya.
He laughed. “You would have loved the trip in the old days. When Sophie brought me by train from Paris, and we crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, they made us all get off the train. Made us get our bags off as well. There were guards with shiny black boots and Alsatian shepherds. I was so frightened. To me they looked like the Gestapo in the American war movies. Sophie wasn’t frightened; she’d seen the real thing. The guards lined us up by the track and went up and down, searching and sniffing, while other guards checked under the carriages with mirrors and up inside the ceiling, everywhere anything could be hidden.
“Later, I understood if we had been going the other way, they would have been looking for people. It happened. There were always people desperate enough to try. But going east, it was books, pictures, magazines, cameras. You were not allowed to have cameras. I had an American comic book Mosjoukine had given me, the Justice League of America. Do you know them? Aquaman, the Green Lantern.” He pointed at me, “Wonder Woman,” then at himself, “Superman.” I laughed. “Well, of course, they took that away. Also a book of Sophie’s about the French Resistance. They were very suspicious. We stood there for what seemed like forever. I remember it started to rain.
“Then a special guard came down the line to stamp our passports. He had this briefcase strapped around his chest that flipped open and made a little desk. It had a light built into it. He looked just like a robot. I was sure he was a robot. It’s a Czech word, but I didn’t know that then. Robota—it means drudgery, compulsory work. The guard took our passports and he stamped and stamped, all over every page, as if he were killing ants, as if he were blotting out the people we had been.
“Finally we piled back into the cars, but I slowed Sophie down, and by the time we got on, there was barely room to stand, let alone sit. We were jammed on top of our suitcases inside the door to the WC. I kept telling her it smelled bad, like pee-pee, I was saying, and she kept telling me she agreed, but that there was nothing she could do about it. Then one of conductors came and got us. He took us to the conductors’ compartment. Word had gotten around that Sophie was immigrating, that she was such a good party member she was coming to live the kind of life they led. I think they were flattered. I think they thought she was crazy.
“So they gave her vodka and me chocolate and put a conductor’s hat on me. She was beautiful then, you know, our mother. They couldn’t take their eyes off her. When it got dark, they let me sleep in one of the bunks that were reserved for them. Sophie sat up telling them they were lucky, so lucky to be building a new world, the Czech socialist workers�
� paradise. Listening to her, I think they almost believed it.”
We were sitting side by side, and Ilya held my hand while he told me this story, as if we were Hansel and Gretel left in the forest by a father who couldn’t feed us and a stepmother who wouldn’t allow us back. A fairy tale too close to the truth, in our case. Somewhere over Poland, my brother fell asleep. But I didn’t let go of his hand until we had our wheels on the ground.
We landed in Moscow just before midnight, but Sheremetyevo Airport was locked up tight. Not a kiosk or food stall was open. We followed our fellow passengers into a dingy basement and stood in the passport control line. A bored and sleepy official fingered our newly acquired visas and then stamped our passports. At customs, none of the three agents on duty seemed interested in searching my purse or Ilya’s rucksack, though they descended on a poor African from our flight. Free to enter Russia, we wandered across the terminal, walking in a daze side by side. Then I heard someone whistle, high, shrill. “Ilya!” a man shouted. Ilya was slower. I poked him. A man with a silvery Elvis pompadour came toward us. He was as wide and tall as a door, but a whole lot thicker. Now Ilya saw him, too. For this friend he opened his arms. They hugged, Ilya clapping his friend on the back. Pavel, his Russian friend, rubbed the knuckles of his right hand on Ilya’s head. Ilya let go first. He waved a hand at me.
“Pasha,” he said, “meet Vera. Vera, meet Pavel.”
“Enchanted,” Pavel said with a much better French accent than mine. He looked around. “No luggage?”
Ilya shook his head. “We’re living out of our pockets.” Pavel laughed, as if this were either a joke or maybe an expression in Russian for traveling on nothing but raw nerves.
“Well, come on then,” he said. “The car is parked right outside. I don’t want to have to bribe the security guy twice.”
Pavel’s Mercedes was parked half up on the curb. Three security guards stood nearby, but when they saw it was Pavel, they all studiously looked away. Ilya got in the front seat, me in the back, and before I could figure out if there were seat belts or how to work them, Pavel put the car in gear, floored it, and we shot off the curb and into traffic as if someone had waved the checkered flag. The acceleration flattened me against the seat. “I didn’t know you knew how to drive, Pasha,” I heard Ilya say with what I thought was a light touch of irony.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 18
