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.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,breaksintohischildhoodhomeandopensthesafe,onlytobediscovered 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. NowIwantedtopullthesametrick,wakeup.Butthatwasn’tgoingtohappen. 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 policevan.Onlyonedimlight,acandlemoredistantthanastar,wasflickering, almost going out, but not quite. Somewhere out there, Mosjoukine was alive 190 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 sergeantinchargewouldtellmelater.“Atleastyoudiditinthe10thArrondissement 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.” 191 “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...
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