My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  “Are you threatening me?” I said, turning on her. “Let me go, or I’ll scream.”

  She released me. “Listen to me,” she said. “He’s dead—that’s what he wanted. If you think it’s such a sin, then go to church, if that is something you people do. Go pray for his soul.”

  I glared at her. Spider, Neighbor Death, Angel who had helped my brother out of his pain. “I’ll pray for you,” I said. I spat at her feet. Then I walked away. When I reached the quay, for no reason, I ran. If I was a Jew, if Ilya was, too, would it be right for me to go to a church? I wondered, running. If not a church, where could a mongrel like me go to pray? I’d never set foot in a synagogue or temple and had no idea where to find one in Paris.

  I went to a church, not a famous one or a big one, but the first one I found open, off the Canal St-Martin, that ribbon of water leading to a city of death. I meant to light candles. I knew that was what Catholics did. I would light every candle in the place, then go down on the floor on my face in front of the altar. It would be dramatic. It would be what Mosjoukine would do in a movie. I hoped it would hurt. I hoped it might knock me unconscious.

  There weren’t any candles inside this church, only electric lights arranged in what looked like giant versions of the candelabras Americans put in their windows at Christmas or oversized menorahs, each bulb the shape of a flame. They stood by each of the side altars; one for the Virgin; one for St. Joseph, her husband, the patron saint of cuckolds; one for St. Barbara, who cut off her own breasts with a knife. The largest candelabra stood in front of the main altar with its Christ in carved agony. I walked down the side aisles flipping the little switches, turning on all the electric votive lights. Here, here, welcome the soul of my brother.

  Then I took the two hundred euros I’d gotten out of the ATM and stuffed it into the tiny box labeled Tronc, meant to hold nothing but small coins to pay for the electricity. I stepped back to look at the effect. It wasn’t impressive. It wasn’t the blaze I wanted to signal God that my brother was on his way. The small bulbs looked too much like the lights in the Mémorial de la Déportation, that too subtle marker of the Holocaust in Paris. Where had God been then? Or during that last hour in Terezine, the camp already liberated, when He looked the other way as Robert Desnos died of typhus?

  So I walked back down one aisle and up the other, knocking over the racks of lights, stand after stand. They fell with a satisfying clatter, the bulbs exploding with a popping sound like Christmas ornaments knocked from high on the tree. Finally, I tipped over the largest set by the main altar. That must have thrown the circuit breaker, because the church suddenly went dim. The only illumination was the evening sun bleeding through the smog-darkened windows. I heard someone open a door to the left of the altar. Then, a second later, I heard the door shut again. The priest had taken one look at me and was calling the cops. Who could blame him?

  Then I saw the two real candles on the altar, tall white ones as thick as the neighbor’s forearms. The least I could do for Ilya would be to light those. So I climbed over the railing and up onto the marble slab of the altar. I looked up and saw the crucified Christ, his ribs so painfully thin, the scar of the wound on his side, his long hair sweaty, spilling down. I thought, Oh, Lord, that’s my brother. That’s my brother up there.

  I was trying to climb high enough to reach him, touch him, when the police arrived, grabbed me by each ankle, and pulled me, with one hard jerk, back to the ground.

  20

  In l’angoissante aventure, the movie I had largely slept through in Ilya’s apartment, Mosjoukine, desperate for money to buy medicine for his daughter, breaks into his childhood home and opens the safe, only to be discovered by his estranged father, who attacks him. They fight, and Mosjoukine kills his own father. In the apartment, I’d woken up to see this nightmare playing out on the tape.

  What ending could be more sadly Russian than that? Then—unbelievably, astoundingly—the film changes. It pulls the world’s oldest trick. Mosjoukine, young again, boyish, wakes up on the couch in his father’s study where he has fallen asleep. Every bitter moment of the film had been nothing but a dream. It was an impossible ending, one too silly for words, but I was overjoyed. Anything was better than the story turning out to be true.

  Now I wanted to pull the same trick, wake up. But that wasn’t going to happen. My brother, Ilya, was dead.

  When I told Ilya my dead were with me always, he’d laughed. Now, as the police hauled me from the church, as my eyes closed from whatever opiate they’d stuck in my arm, I thought, where is my brother? I felt the air around me for him, for at least some sense of him.

  He wasn’t there. The others—the colonel, my mothers, my husband and my daughter, and Anne-Sophie—were gone, too. The world was flat and empty. The world was full of nothing but the strangers lifting me into a midnight blue police van. Only one dim light, a candle more distant than a star, was flickering, almost going out, but not quite. Somewhere out there, Mosjoukine was alive still. I wished I had my hands around his throat. Why did he live and not Ilya? I wanted to find Ilya in the kitchen. I would have taken him angry—about to throw a coffee pot, knives. I would have settled for an Ilya who was not speaking to me, just to have a living brother who would stay in this world with me.

  But I was alone.

  I woke up in the local police station, in a cell that looked remarkably like a budget hotel room, with a bed, a TV, and a table with two cheap upholstered chairs. “Every day some tourist goes crazy in one of the churches in Paris,” the sergeant in charge would tell me later. “At least you did it in the 10th Arrondissement and not in some church filled with treasures of French patrimony.”

  Patrimony, that was where this had all started. I had asked, Where did I come from? Now the question left to be answered was, Where will I end up?

  The next morning, after a policewoman finished taking down my side of the story of why I had felt moved to desecrate a church even though I wasn’t a Catholic, there was a knock on the door and the sergeant came in with Nance Olmstead, the other survivor of this deadly drama we were in. The sergeant disappeared and left her with me. They were hoping she would take the trouble that was me off their busy French hands.

  She sat opposite me at the table and took both my hands. I noticed that my right hand, the one I had used to strike down the candelabras in my scuffle with the church, was dotted with small cuts the exploding light bulbs must have made. The blood was dry, but as Nance squeezed my hands for all she was worth, one of the cuts reopened. There was blood, first on my hand, then on her hands, which seemed rather appropriate, considering. She didn’t notice, only leaned across the table, holding on as if she thought I might get away again, as if she couldn’t believe she had found me, apparently well, or at least still alive.

  “You had the key from the hotel in your purse,” she said, explaining how the police reached her. “You forgot to turn it in when you left in such a hurry.” That was putting it mildly, since I’d almost knocked her down to run away from her. “Last night I was standing at the desk at the hotel, checking you out like you asked me to, when the police called to ask the clerk if you’d come to Paris with anyone, if there was anyone at the hotel who knew you.”

  “Good timing,” I said. Then, as she clung to my hands, I explained how my life had become such a bloody tragedy, though maybe one that bordered on farce. I told her everything that had happened to me since Aunt Z appeared on my doorstep. I talked and talked. I couldn’t shut up. She listened. Maybe she thought she owed me that much. I told her about the trip to New York, about Apolline leading to Ilya, about Mosjoukine and Sophie. I told her about the trip to Moscow. I told her more about Mosjoukine than she ever wanted to hear. She was my confessor or the nearest thing I had to one. “Oh, Lord,” she said. She bit hard at one fingernail, “Oh, Lord,” reduced to using repetition for emphasis the way good midwesterners did.

  When I finished telling her about Ilya’s death, she put her head on the table. I rememb
ered seeing the bloody gurney with her son rolling across the intersection after he had killed both himself and my family. I felt sorry for her, and also—God forgive me—I took pleasure in causing her pain, in the name of my husband, in the name of my daughter. Then that bitter satisfaction passed and a little healing began.

  She raised her head and looked me in the eye. She was looking better. She had found some time between when I had seen her at the Hôtel Batignolles and her appearance at the jail to shower, wash and blow-dry her hair, and change into fresh clothes, a mint green pantsuit this time. She’d put on pink lipstick and taken an emery board to what was left of her nails. I could tell she was a woman used to being both tidy and in charge. If she could rescue me, then she could still do good in this world. If she could save someone as childless, as bereft as she was, she could go on with her life.

  Maybe she could save me. She, more than anyone else, knew what I had lost before I came to Paris. Our children had died at the same bloody moment, as if they’d fallen together in the same battle of the same useless war. After I finished my story, Nance sat for a moment. She took back her hands, let them fall in her lap. When she did, I realized I had been hanging on to her just as hard as she’d been holding on to me. Now I felt frightened, like the black pilot standing on his own at the top of the swaying Eiffel Tower.

  She leaned forward. “Listen,” she said. “I have to know the answer to one question.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I couldn’t guess what the question would be. “What is it you need to know?”

  “Are you going to kill yourself?”

  I started to answer, but she stopped me, raising her hand. “If you say yes, I’m going to leave you here. If you say yes, I can’t stay. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my son. I feel responsible. I know at least half of what you’re feeling, if only half. But if you die while I’m with you or while I’m watching or when I’m in the next room, it’s going to kill me. It will be the end of me, too.” She was crying, and the mascara she’d put on ran down her face like dirty water, turning the hairs above her lip a sad gray.

  There we were, the two who didn’t die, like Horatio and Fortinbras at the bloody end of Hamlet. I thought of my mother, my father, Ilya, all slipping away, leaving me alone in the room. I made my decision. I took Nance’s hands back in mine. “I won’t,” I said. “I promise I won’t do that to you.”

  21

  The police made it clear they expected me to leave Paris at the soonest possible opportunity. I would be sent a bill for the damages to the church. They would have liked me out on the very next flight, but I’d had enough of last-minute flying and I wasn’t ready to leave, not until I’d buried my brother. So they released me into Nance Olmstead’s custody, warning her to keep me in the strictest charge. I was to stay out of churches, and also, they said, under no circumstances was I allowed to ascend the Eiffel Tower. I could see that last bit got her worried.

  I wanted her to go back to the Hôtel Batignolles, to trust me to meet her there later, but she took the police warning seriously. So she went with me to the Hôpital St-Louis. We entered through the door I’d seen the orderly use with Ilya, but once inside there was no desk guarded by nurses, no signs pointing this way to Emergency, just a long white hall punctuated at intervals by empty wooden benches and by tall doors, most closed. “French hospitals are always like this,” Nance said. Clearly, it was not her first time in one. I remembered what she’d told me back at the Hôtel Batignolles about flying to France to rescue students. “To us, St-Louis looks like an octopus that’s all arms and no head. The French don’t need registration desks manned by clerks whose job it is to collect insurance information. They don’t have to worry about getting stiffed for the bill.” she went on. “But there’s always someone around who knows what you need to know. Shall I ask?” I nodded, thinking better a reassuring matron in soft pastels than someone clearly a lot less stable, possibly crazy.

  Nance headed down the hall with me trailing behind until she found a nurse in a room lined with filing cabinets. I stood a few feet away as Nance talked to her. Nance’s voice was low, reasonable. The nurse pointed down the hall, said something that sounded like a room number. Nance looked startled. Stepping forward, she whispered a question. The nurse, with a puzzled frown in my direction, followed Nance’s lead and whispered her reply.

  “What?” I said. “What?” Nance turned toward me, one hand outstretched.

  “Your brother isn’t dead,” she said. “He’s in the room at the end of the hall.”

  Her words buzzed in my ears. I shook my head like a spaniel coming out of the water. “Say that again.” She did.

  My brother, I thought, and my body took me down that hall in one fluid motion, for once moving the way my brother did every day. I hit the tall door still running, pushed it open. And there he was. His face was half-hidden by an oxygen mask. His blond hair, wet with sweat, fanned across the pillow above his head as if he were under water. A tube ran from his chest into a bubbling tank. My brother as merman. But I could see his chest rising and falling. He was breathing. He was alive.

  It was L’Angoissante Aventure—and I had just woken up. My heart turned over in my chest with a painful thud. But Ilya was not awake and smiling like the father in Mosjoukine’s movie. For my brother, the day before had been more than a bad dream. With the chest tube and an IV dripping into his arm, he looked frighteningly like Anne-Sophie. Still, I took his hand and it felt wonderfully warm. His eyes fluttered, opened. I expected him to be angry. I’d let the one thing happen to him I had promised would not. He was in the hospital in a web of tubing. He just looked surprised. His eyes wrinkled into a smile. He pushed the mask up with his free hand, and I saw a goofy, lopsided grin. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He was loopy, clearly stoned. No matter that he had been injecting morphine every day. I had never seen him high. Now he was flying. I wondered if he thought we were both dead.

  “Where do you think here is?” I asked him. He gave a small, one-shouldered shrug.

  “Paradise,” he said. “Where else would we be?” He closed his eyes.

  “You scared me, brother,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

  I heard the door behind me open and turned, expecting to see Nance, but it was the doctor who’d found Ilya in the courtyard. He was wearing a hospital ID badge that said Dr. Bonheur. Dr. Happiness. If I hadn’t known him as the neighbor’s customer, I might have taken that as a good sign. As it was, it seemed bitterly ironic. I wondered if he felt the same.

  Dr. Bonheur came to stand beside me as if we had known each other a long time. It seemed like we had. “You’re his sister?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, wondering whether he knew that from the neighbor or from talking to Nance in the hall or just from looking from Ilya to me.

  “Well, don’t be frightened. He’s sedated. A collapsed lung is very painful. We’re draining the fluid.” He pointed at the tube running from Ilya’s chest. “We have him on a wide spectrum antibiotic, and he seems to be responding.”

  “Why isn’t he dead?” When I said it—dead—I started crying. Tears made their usual way down either side of my nose. Damn, damn, I’d thought I was done with all that.

  Dr. Bonheur pulled a tissue from his lab coat pocket and offered it to me. I took it.

  “He didn’t get enough morphine for an overdose.”

  “Because he was already taking such a large dose?” Dr. Bonheur laughed, as if calling the amount of morphine Ilya used a large dose was the best joke he’d heard all day.

  “Because the syringe he was using was too small. He needed two injections for a lethal dose and before he could use the second, he lost consciousness. An amateur, your brother.” Dr. Bonheur gave me a small smile, acknowledging what we both knew—that he wasn’t one. “I thought you saw me pick up the full syringe and knew what that meant.”

  I shook my head. “I thought he was dead.”

  Dr. Bonheur crossed his arms on his chest,
and we both stood there for a minute watching my brother breathe.

  “The cancer caused the collapsed lung?” I asked, finally.

  “Actually, the pleurisy. Pleurisy? Do you know what that is? Fluid between the walls of his lung. He had some pneumonia as well. Scarring from a previous surgery can predispose a patient to infections of this type.”

  “But the cancer is back?”

  Dr. Bonheur pursed his lips. “Very likely, I’m afraid. We’ll know for certain after we take a second set of X-rays. The first ones were too obscured by the fluid to get a clear picture. We are going to do more tests now.”

  I looked at my brother, asleep, tethered by his tubing. “Doesn’t it say in his medical record? I thought he’d seen a doctor.”

  Dr. Bonheur shook his head. “I think he diagnosed himself. Your brother is not someone who likes hospitals. He made that clear when he woke up here.”

  “Damn it.” Ilya hadn’t even been to see a doctor. If only I had noticed how sick he was sooner.

  Dr. Bonheur touched my shoulder. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, and I guessed from his downcast eyes, his slightly embarrassed expression, that he was talking about Ilya’s attempted suicide. “You have to remember that he was in terrible pain. In such circumstances, who can hold onto their rational nature?”

  Ilya had, I thought. He’d told me he didn’t want to end up in the hospital. Told me quite simply what he intended with the torn picture from Kean, then he’d had the courage to do it, knowing I would be angry and I might never forgive him. No, he knew I would forgive him, sooner or later. What else could a sister do? But it hadn’t turned out the way he intended, and now he—we—would just take each hour as it came. No disappearing into a new life like our father, not this time, not for either of us.