My Life as a Silent Movie: A Novel

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, We went back to the apartment. The neighbor, wise woman, was not outside as we passed. By the time Ilya unlocked the top door, I was asleep in my boots. After the fencing lesson and the visit to the nursing home, I was numb and tired clear through, muscles, heart, and brain. I wished my brother goodnight, keeping my promise not to ask anything out of bounds like, Will you be okay? He’d been okay for forty-two years. Who was I to presume otherwise now? I’d run from the Place Ste-Odile and into the colonel’s arms that morning so long ago, abandoning Ilya, without a second’s hesitation.Ihadn’tbeenwithhimwhenhewasuprootedandmovedtoCzechoslovakiabyourmother .Ihadn’tbeenatthehospitalwithIlyawhenMosjoukine left never to return. I had been growing up in Florida, in a bedroom full of Barbies, in a house surrounded by tangerine trees. I hadn’t driven with him to Prague to find our mother already dead and gone for a year. I hadn’t been there when Anne-Sophie was born or at any difficult moment of the fourteen years of her life. I had gotten married and had my own daughter by caesarian section and not even under the truth serum of anesthesia had I remembered, or even dreamed about, my lost brother. I pulled off my boots sitting on the bed, then fell backward onto the feather mountain of pillows. I was asleep before I could take off my socks. I dreamed I was riding in the carriage in Michel Strogoff, sitting next to Mosjoukine in Nadia’s place. Just as in the movie, we were riding through a terrible storm, with the horses running mad through dark, whipping trees. 13 129 I was waiting for Mosjoukine to reassure me, to stand holding the reins in one hand and tell me, Never be afraid. Instead, he turned toward me slowly, as if the film were running at half speed. “Watch out, little Vera,” he said. “It isn’t the end yet.” Then a tree came crashing down in front of the carriage, and I was watching the movie again. Nadia was back on the seat next to the dashing Strogoff,secretcourierforhisczar.Someonewasshouting.GraduallyIrealized it was not in my dream but outside my window, in the courtyard. One of the voices was my brother’s. I jumped out of bed and opened the curtain. It was still dark, but I could see Ilya in the light from the lamp over the passageway. He was standing talking to the neighbor, waving his arms. She stood with her hands on her hips. I thought about his joke with the knife in the kitchen, about Ilya swinging the barge pole at my feet. After what he had told me about Barbara’s addiction, I was afraid. I opened the window. “Ilya?” I called. He turned, looked up to see where my voice was coming from. “It’s okay,” he said, waving me away. “There’s nothing going on. Go back to bed.” The neighbor sat down on her chair and crossed her thick arms across her broad chest. She didn’t seem worried she was about to be murdered. Still I wanted him upstairs, away from the spider. “The telephone is ringing,” I said, lying. He looked up again. Then suddenly it was. “Really?” “Yes.” “Don’t answer it,” he said. “I’ll be right up.” I ran for the kitchen anyway, slipping across the linoleum in my socks. My heartwaspounding,partlybecauseofmyadrenalinedashoutofmydream,but also because I had never heard Ilya’s antique telephone ring. I hadn’t known it was connected. Ilya bounded up the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen. He grabbed the black handset off its hook and held it hard against his right ear as if the message might be coming from a very long way off. He leaned his back against the kitchen wall, panting hard, trying to catch his breath. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Sister. Of course. No, no, I understand.” Just that, then he hung up and 130 slid down the wall onto the linoleum. He sat there, his hands in his lap. I knew without hearing the nun on the other end of the line that Anne-Sophie had not made it through the night. “Ilya?” “Go to bed,” he said. He looked up at me as if he were afraid I might hit him, that I might say those most unforgivable, most painful words—Anne-Sophie. “Please.” “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” In bed...