9
, 9 I must have swayed a little, bobbled.Ilya,afraidImightfaintagain, took me by the elbow and plopped me into one of the claw-footed velvet chairs. A cloud of dust rose up to meet me. I sneezed, sneezed again, then when my eyes stopped watering, I saw a framed picture of Vera Holodnaya on the marble table beside me. Stuck in the bottom of the ornate silver frame was a snapshot of Sophie Desnos, holding two newborn babies, one in each arm. Ilya and Vera. My brother. Me. Ilya went through a doorway into the kitchen and made coffee, put lots of sugar in it for me. He handed the cup to me with a slight, polite bow, then he sat cross-legged on the floor and watched me drink. “So?” he said. “What do you know? What do you want to know?” “This,” I said looking around me, “this was Ivan Mosjoukine’s apartment?” “Yes,” Ilya said. Ilyahadpulledopenthecurtains,andIcouldseethelivingroommoreclearly. Time had not stood still. The curtains were not the only thing that had faded. The sofa looked more rust than red plush. Squares of an even deeper green checkeredthewalls,markingspotswherepaintingshadoncehungbeforebeing taken down, perhaps sold. On some of the tables were stacks of photographs, as if some of the frames, maybe valuable sterling ones like the one that held Vera Holodnaya, had been sold as well. There was still a stunning amount of furniture .NowIcouldseeababygrandpianopushedupagainstthewallattheendof the room. From where I sat, I could read the oversized gilt letters of the maker’s name over the keyboard, C. Bechstein, Sr. Major der Kaisers und Königs, a piano 79 fit for a king. Next to it, a large armoire and two dressers with beveled mirrors that really belonged in a bedroom huddled together, as if they had come into the living room for company, for safety in numbers. The style wasn’t 1929. The furniture would have been terribly out of date by the twenties. It was the sort of dark, nineteenth-century furniture that would have filled a flat in Moscow beforetherevolutionoreventhehouseinPenzawhereMosjoukinehadbeenborn . A good half of the forest of photographs were of Mosjoukine. I got up, wandered around the room looking. Photographs in frames were arranged on the piano as well. I touched two fingers to the piano keys. One key made no sound, the other made three strings sound at once. All the framed photographs were studio shots, the kind stars used for publicity pictures. I counted four shots of Mosjoukine from Kean, all signed Ivan Mosjoukine with the large looping hand that I recognized from the back of Apolline’s postcard. In another, a young Ivan posed on a couch with a lustrous black poodle, his signature at the bottom indecipherable in Cyrillic. Also, Mosjoukine in costume from a dozen other movies I didn’t recognize. In one, he wore the robes of an Orthodox priest. A heavy beard and makeup aged him into the old man he had apparently survived to be. There were also plentyofheadshotsofhimdressedinexpensivestreetclothes,likeinApolline’s postcard. Wearing shirts with French cuffs and heavy gold cuff links. In one, a snappy fedora. He started young in them, then started to age, shot by shot. The focus got softer, but there was no hiding the soft flesh under the eyes, the lines on either side of his mouth that Ilya inherited. I guessed from the clothes Mosjoukine wore that the latest picture was probably from the early thirties. Taken at the dead end of his career, then—nothing. Even in the later ones, he had the most magnetic eyes. They looked out of the photographs like the eyes of the living, saying, Look at me. I held up the photograph of Mosjoukine as priest for Ilya to see. “And Ivan Mosjoukine, the silent film actor, was my—our—father?” “Yes.” “Jesus,” I said. Somehow, until that moment, it hadn’t seemed real. I sat in the overstuffed armchair, sending up a second cloud of dust. “And this,” I pointed at the picture of Sophie holding her twins, “is our mother?” Ilyatiltedhisheadtolookatthephotograph.“Yes,that’sSophie,ourmother.” 80 “Anne-Sophie Desnos?” He sighed. “So she said.” His answer was as vague as Apolline’s. “Does she live here?” “No,” Ilya said. “She doesn’t. She’s been dead for years.” Oh, no, not her, too, I thought, looking at the photograph of our mother. I picked up the heavy silver frame. I’d come all the way to Paris to find her, and now this was as close...
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