“Ah,” he said, keeping his eyes on mine, not letting me look away. “Little Vera. Did you find your brother?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s in Moscow with me, but he wouldn’t come. He hasn’t forgiven you for leaving.”
Mosjoukine laughed softly, his voice a bit hoarse. When he did, he closed his eyes and the effect was startling, like one of those pictures of Jesus done in lenticular 3-D. If you looked at it one way, you saw Jesus risen from the tomb, then with the tiniest shift in perspective, Jesus was dead on the cross. With his eyes closed, Mosjoukine was older than old. Not like in Father Sergius where, though the makeup used to age his face was remarkably good, his body had stayed strong. Now he was shrunken in on himself like an old potato the cook had forgotten to throw away. Then he opened his eyes, and he was Ivan Mosjoukine again, essentially unchanged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t laugh. It isn’t a joke, but it was all a long time ago. I did go to Prague. I don’t suppose your brother believes that?”
“No,” I shook my head.
“I went to get your mother, and she reported me to the secret police. Can you believe that? Sophie had me arrested. That woman was tough.”
“Arrested? You were in a Czech jail?”
Mosjoukine laughed again, as if at 102 the past were nothing but one long string of good punch lines. “Deported,” he said, “sent back to Russia. She knew I was a Soviet citizen, no matter that I had a French passport.”
“And then?”
He shrugged one shoulder, a gesture that matched Ilya’s perfectly. “Russia,” he said, “is a prison inside a prison inside a prison.” He made a gesture with his hands, as if he were opening nesting dolls. “It always has been. Soviet or czarist, or now, under our new democracy of plutocrats. Nothing really changes. I ended up in the east, in Siberia.”
I gestured at the cell, the monastery beyond. “And in Siberia, you found God?”
This time he didn’t laugh. “That’s the wrong question, Vera.” He tapped his knuckle on the metal hospital tray. “God is never lost.” I remembered a philosophy class I had in college on Spinoza. God is in the table; God is in all of us. Then Mosjoukine smiled again, bent his head close to mine. “Though the church did get me out of Siberia and back to the capital.” Now he closed his eyes, and his hand loosened its grip on mine. I thought he had fallen asleep, and started to slip my hand out of his, but his eyes opened. “I thought about trying to get to Paris. There are Orthodox even there. I did want to see it again. See your brother if he was where I thought he would be.” If Mosjoukine knew Ilya would be living in the apartment at 44 Place Ste-Odile, why hadn’t he written to Ilya the way he had written to Apolline? “But I knew he would never forgive me. And I don’t travel easily anymore.” He nodded toward the wheelchair, folded in the far corner of the cell.
“Why wouldn’t he believe you?” I said. “If he knew you went to Prague …”
Mosjoukine waved my protests away. “Because it isn’t about me. He loved his mother. I took him away. He loved his mother more than anything.” He looked at me, as if weighing what to say. “Except maybe you. He never forgot you. But his mother didn’t love him back, not like that. She loved him less than she loved Marx. Maybe even less than me. Me, at least she cared about enough to have arrested, cared about enough to hate. Her children, she gave away, or let other people take.”
“Why?” I said. “Were we so unlovable?”
He shook his head. “That was Sophie. I think something terrible happened to her in the war. She wouldn’t talk about it, but she never grew up, and a child can’t be a mother. She was always a ten-year-old girl inside, the world all in black and white, her soul full of this terrible hunger for perfection. That was the attraction communism held for her. It promised perfection, inhuman, unforgiving perfection. If it hadn’t been communism, she might have ended up a nun or a Zionist. Sophie had no patience for people. They were too prone to weakness, to failures of will.” He tapped my hand.
“But she loved you.”
My father nodded. “For a while. I think I reminded her of someone, her father perhaps.” He laughed. “Maybe her grandfather. She thought I was the one person on her side. Then I failed her, too. I wasn’t there when you and your brother were born. She never forgave me.” He shrugged.
“Did you love her?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “She was so fiercely alive. She reminded me of …”
“Of Vera Holodnaya?”
He waved his hand. “Only her eyes. In temperament, she reminded me of myself. She reminded me of the way I used to be when I was that young. And,” he smiled wryly, self-deprecatingly, “I always did love myself. It was my tragic flaw. My great sin, really.” He waved his hand at his cell. “Though I pray I have finally gotten over it.”
“Did you love us?” I asked him. I held my breath.
“Of course,” he said. “I loved all my children.” He squeezed my fingers. “But I wasn’t a good father. I don’t lie to myself about that anymore. I was only a good father in my movies. It’s the great occupational hazard of acting, confusing the role with reality. That and poverty. Oh, and drink.”
The door opened. Brother Paul peeked in. Mosjoukine made a shooing motion, and the door closed again. “How is the colonel?” he asked me. “He was one of the most intelligent men I ever knew, not that it did him any good. An army is a hard place for a smart man. I could have told him he would never become a general.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “His wife, too.”
“So young?”
“They were both in their eighties,” I said. He nodded, though I guessed from his vantage point that still seemed tragically young.
“You’ll live much longer,” he said. I shook my head. I doubted that.
“My daughter died,” I said. “My husband, too. I don’t want a long life alone.”
“Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
He put his hand on my head the way I had seen him touch the pilgrims. I rested my forehead on his other hand, the one I was still holding. He was quiet so long I wondered if he was praying. Or if he had fallen asleep. I looked up. Tears were running from his blue eyes, into the deep folds on either side of his nose. They were dripping with little splashes into his half-finished bowl of borscht.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Meaning, I think, I shouldn’t have told you. He had been Julia’s grandfather.
“I’m the one who is sorry,” he said. “If I had led a different life, I might have at least seen her play.” He might have stopped by with a red bicycle, I heard Ilya, my cynical brother, say. We were twins, but we were not the same. I believed Mosjoukine. I had to. He said he had loved all his children, loved Ilya, loved me. He had confessed his neglect of us and repented. He would have loved his granddaughter, if only fate had given him the chance. I kissed my weeping father’s shaking old hand.
“Vera,” he said, “what I’m going to tell you now is true. Doubt anything else I say but this. Tell me, how old are you?”
“Forty-two,” I said.
“I almost died when I was forty. Your forties are the hardest time. You want so many things when you are young or maybe even have them and lose them, then there comes a day when you’re alone, when everything you had is gone. You think your life is over. Do you hear me?”
I did. I said, “Yes, Father.”
“But if you can get past your forties, it’s easy. Look at me! Have you ever seen anyone older and uglier?”
“No,” I said. But he wasn’t ugly, I thought, and he knew it. Old, yes, but never ugly. Not Ivan Mosjoukine. At least, not with his eyes open.
“I’ve never been happier. You’ll live to be one hundred, Vera. I know these things.”
He looked at me with those amazing eyes, and I believed him. He looked at me, and I could see a good future, faint and pink, on the horizon. I would be okay, Ilya, too. We would both live long enough to be happy again. We would both live to be one hundred. Older, even. I clung to
my father’s hand.
Brother Paul reappeared and stood by the bed, giving no sign of leaving. Mosjoukine’s eyes closed, opened. “I had better go, Father,” I said, kissing his palm.
“I am glad I was here to meet you, my daughter,” he said, his eyes shining, “Tomorrow …” he paused, “God knows. I may not be here. Go with my blessing.” He made the sign of the cross in the air in front of me. “Go and promise me you won’t look back, won’t come back.” I opened my mouth. I wanted to see him again, and he knew it. “Remember,” he pointed one bent finger, fixed his eyes on me. “Never be afraid!” My father, Ivan Mosjoukine in the flesh, not in a movie, said this to me. I felt the words move through my body like electricity. Then his eyes were closing again. “And give your brother my love.”
Brother Paul stayed with Mosjoukine. The short Russian monk led me back through the maze of the monastery, across the courtyard toward the outer door. As soon as I felt the night air, I thought, I have to come back. I needed to bring Ilya to see Mosjoukine. Then we could both turn our faces to the future.
It wasn’t until I was on the street and I heard the monk bolt the heavy monastery gate behind me that I remembered Pavel’s warning. It was the middle of the night, and I was in a neighborhood I didn’t know, God-knows-where in a city I didn’t know, in a country where I spoke exactly one word of the language, nyet. I fumbled for Pavel’s cell phone, but before I could push a button, a car parked down the narrow street roared to life, the lights clicked on, and it squealed forward. Pavel leaned over and opened the passenger side door. “Get in,” he said. “Your brother is worried about you.” I got in, and he took off before I had the door closed.
“Where is Ilya?” I asked.
“He’s not well,” Pavel said, stopping at the corner by smashing on the brakes, then heading into a roundabout with the gas pedal flat on the floor. I clutched the dash.
“How not well?” I asked.
Pavel cleared his throat. “I sent him to see a friend of mine, who runs a pharmacy.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking, that kind of not well. What was I going to do?
Pavel looked sideways at me, but didn’t say anything more. After we had jerked, raced, jerked, and raced across half of Moscow again, he pulled up with a final squeal in front of the hotel. “Did you find what you were looking for? At the monastery?” he asked.
Mosjoukine. I had almost forgotten. “Yes,” I said. “Ilya has to see Father Ivan.” Pavel looked skeptical, and I wondered how much Ilya had told him.
When Pavel spoke, his dismissal was more universal. “This interest in the old religion,” he said, “I don’t get it. What do people see in it? The communists lied to the people. Before that, the church lied. Now the church is all holy again. What’s next? The return of the czar’s cousin’s nephew?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”
He waved a hand, dismissing me, himself, Russian history. “Nothing changes. Go see how your brother is.” He leaned across me to open my door. I got out. “If there’s any trouble,” he pointed a finger at my purse, at his cell phone, which was inside. “Call me. Okay?”
I nodded, then shut the door and he squealed off.
Inside our suite, Ilya was sitting on the couch, moving pieces around on the heavy onyx chess board on the coffee table in a way that made me guess he knew more about the game than I did. Did he think he was fooling me? Because he looked fine. He looked rested, and his color was good. But I knew that somewhere in the apartment was an empty vial, a used syringe. He’d stop when we got back from Moscow, he’d said. We were still here.
He was also halfway through a bottle of vodka. “So,” Ilya said, moving the black queen, “was it Dad?”
“Yes. No question about it.” Ilya looked up at me, the white bishop dangling between the fingers of his right hand. “Listen, Ilya,” I said. Ilya looked down at the chess board again. “He tried to bring Sophie back. He did go to Prague. She had him arrested.”
Ilya laughed. “That’s good.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“No, no, I believe you,” he said. “It’s just what Sophie would do. I don’t know why I didn’t guess that was what happened. Blind, I suppose.”
“So you’ll come with me to see him tomorrow?”
Ilya stared at the board, took a pawn with his knight. “Was that move legal?” he asked. “I haven’t played in so long. I should ask Pasha.”
“Ilya?”
“Go to bed,” he said. “Go to bed. If it means so much to you, I’ll go on the pilgrimage with you. I’ll get down on my knees and kiss the old bastard’s ring, if that will make you happy.” He was still fooling with his pawns. “Will that make you happy, little sister?”
“I want you to be happy,” I said. “I want you to be well.” I put my hand under his chin, lifted his head so he was looking at me.
“Oh,” he poured himself another shot of vodka, “I am happy.”
I left him on the couch, took a shower, and went to bed. I dreamed I was a real pilgrim, walking on my knees over rocky soil. Russian grandmothers all around me were on their knees, too, puffing and coughing. We were trying to reach a church so distant it looked like a toy, like a Christmas ornament. We coughed and coughed, the air full of something like cotton, like dandelion fluff.
I woke up. The coughing, of course, must have been Ilya. Had he sat up, drinking, all night? The fluff was stray feathers from the hotel pillow. Somehow I’d torn the ticking open.
I put on my clothes and went out into the living room. Ilya wasn’t there, though someone had won the chess match. The white king lay, surrendered, on its side. The bottle of vodka was empty. I checked the other bedroom. The bed was untouched. I ordered breakfast. It took a long time coming, but there was still no sign of Ilya. When it was nearly 11:30, time for us to go if we were to have a chance of seeing Father Ivan, just as I was thinking the words lying bastard about my only brother, I heard a car horn outside the window. Ilya was calling my name. I stuck my head out. He was standing, half in and half out of a cab. “Pavel couldn’t come,” he said. “Hurry or we’ll be late.”
I hurried, cursing Ilya under my breath.
The taxi, even though it drove with what I was coming to think of as Moscovian abandon, took nearly twice as long to reach the monastery. As the driver picked his way slowly down the long blocks from the highway, trying to steer his way around the larger potholes, I could already see the crowd in front of the monastery gate. It was even larger than the day before. I frowned at Ilya. We should have come earlier. If this worked as it had yesterday, we were in for a long wait. Unless I could get one of the brothers to take a note to Mosjoukine. I wondered how many euros I had on me. The driver stopped. The crowd was blocking the street. He raised his hands off the steering wheel, let them fall. This was as far as he was going. I gave Ilya my wallet so he could pay off the cab.
As soon as I got out, I could tell the crowd was different from yesterday. People were shouting and angry. Yesterday there had been a bit of shoving, but nothing like this. Ilya came up beside me and took my arm. “What’s going on?” he asked me.
“I don’t know.” The gate to the monastery was closed, and an old woman was pounding on it with her cane. I looked at the digital clock on the cab’s dash. 12:30. It should have been open. Could Father Ivan be ill?
Ilya turned to the people closest to us in the crush and tried his Russian on them. One old man spoke back, his voice a stream of complaint, spit flying from under his heavy, white moustache. Ilya nodded. “What is he saying?” I asked.
Ilya shrugged. “I have no earthly idea. I couldn’t understand a word. Let me try someone else.” He pushed ahead, and I saw him talking to a well-dressed woman in fur. She pointed at the monastery, at heaven, then at the closed gate. Ilya nodded vigorously, yes, yes. He had to use his elbows to get back to me. “She says they won’t let anyone in.” He raised his hands, palms up, to his shoulders, let them drop. “She says the monks told
them Father Ivan isn’t here.”
“Isn’t here? Where else would he be?” Ilya started the pantomime with the hands again, and I turned away disgusted. I looked down the street. There, near the market on the corner, I caught a glimpse of black hem. One of the brothers must have come out a side gate, taking a risk, to do some shopping. “Come on,” I said, grabbing Ilya’s hand, pulling him out of the crowd. We jogged down the block. “In there.” I pointed at the shop.
The monk was stepping out of the shop with a liter of Coca-Cola. It was Brother Paul. I grabbed his sleeve. “Where is he?” I said. “What’s going on?”
Brother Paul tried to pull away, but now Ilya was there, standing with one foot on the hem of the monk’s robe. The shop clerk just inside the door was pointedly looking the other way, as if she didn’t care one way or the other what happened to these servants of God. “He left,” Brother Paul said. His eyes were red, and as he spoke, he looked as if he might start crying again. “Sometime in the night, after I went back to my cell. When I went to get him this morning, his bed was empty.”
“How could he?” I said. “He was there when I left.”
Brother Paul frowned. “You weren’t the last. There was another girl. She looked a lot like you, but she was younger.”
Suddenly Ilya was laughing. He was laughing so hard, he nearly bent double. Had he gone crazy? He waved a hand by his head, as if brushing the whole thing away. Then he started to walk into the street. I caught at his sleeve.
“What! What?” I said to him.
“You don’t get it, do you?” he said. He was wiping tears from his face with the side of his hand. He had been laughing that hard. “It’s Father Sergius. Suddenly the saint is gone. He just can’t stop. He’s still living out his damn movies.”
Ilya was talking about the scene near the end of Father Sergius where the monk flees into the night. I had a hard time imagining the man I had seen last night fleeing anywhere. At least, not without help. I looked around for Brother Paul, but he was gone, no doubt making a run for the safety of the monastery walls. He had said the girl who came to visit had looked a lot like me. “Which one are you?” Mosjoukine had asked me. I had a vision of another sibling, someone younger, the product of Mosjoukine’s long years in Siberia. Some young Russian girl who owned a fast car. He’d told me not to come back because he knew he was leaving.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 20
