The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “Nothing.” Helene paused, oddly ashamed. “It’s a nonsense tale.”

  “I’ve come for a nonsense tale.”

  She smiled. “Have you?”

  “It’s what I’ve been searching for.”

  “Then listen.” Helene leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. “I have your missing piece, Eliza, but if you are to receive it, you must forget the name of this old woman. This is not a story about grown-ups, you understand. It’s not about anything you’ve learned in your travels. This is a story about the beings that live in our dreams, the gastromancer and the dybbuk—a nonsense tale, you see. It’s about dreamers, about children, and what happens to us during wartime.”

  2 YEARS BEFORE

  FAUX SOIR

  The Pyromaniac

  I KNEW IT, just by the looks of the fellow: he wouldn’t be buying a paper, not him. Here was a man who was too good, too bright, for the workingman’s paper. But I’d not sold a paper in hours, nor eaten in three days. I was so weak I could no longer make a fist. Half-mad with hunger, I put my hand in the man’s pocket.

  The man whirled, unkempt hair flying. “What the devil—?” His eyes fell on me. They were wide and bright, as though spinning tall tales everywhere he looked. “Are you trying to pick my pocket?”

  “No, monsieur.” I was. “I’m collecting payment for the paper you’re about to buy.” I slid over a copy of Le Soir.

  He laughed, surprising me. The man had a good, loud laugh that the alley could not contain. Smiling, he dropped a handful of coins on my newsstand. “Keep the money,” he said, “and the paper.”

  “Thank you, monsieur!” My stomach tightened at the prospect of apples and pastries.

  “My pleasure.”

  The man prepared to walk away. I remember that I did not want him to go, this strange little man who was so loose with his coin. So I said, “Where have you come from, monsieur?”

  “Hmm? Oh, church, if you can believe that.” He pulled a face. “I’ve been going regular with a girl who won’t come to bed on Saturday night without repenting for it the Sunday after.”

  “What was it about, monsieur?”

  “Well, I met her at a barbershop—”

  “The sermon.”

  “Haven’t the slightest.”

  “You mean you sat through it and you don’t know?”

  “It was quite boring.” I got the impression he felt this way about a lot of things. He looked at me, his eyes softening. I’d set up my table—just a stack of crates, really—where the smallest alley in Anderlecht kissed the longest street. As the man lifted his face to the sun, I watched passersby marveling at the pair of us. “I do recall this one bit, though. I rather liked it—a good bit of theater. The minister got to the part where Christ was being carried away by his followers. Have you heard this? His body had been pierced by a spear.” He mimed throwing a javelin. “As his disciples carried him off, they tore at their clothes and dipped the cloth into his blood. Isn’t that extraordinary?” The man shook his head, laughing.

  I, too, cared little for sermons (before the Nazis came to Toulouse, my parents had wielded all manner of threats to get me to attend church). The man smiled down at me, asking me to forgive him his interest in theater over morality. I did. He held out his hand, and we shook. “My name is Marc Aubrion,” he said.

  Since fleeing Toulouse for Brussels, I’d found it easier to live as a boy. Scabby-kneed lads were part of the landscape; orphaned girls kicked up clouds of attention wherever they walked. But I was prepared now, for reasons I could not articulate, to introduce myself—my real self—to Marc Aubrion: “I’m—”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  I froze, off-balance. “Monsieur?”

  “People with names die in this war. Haven’t you seen the papers? The lists of fallen soldiers grow longer each week.”

  To my knowledge, I’d never spoken to anyone on either side of this war, content to walk the space between Nazis and resistance fighters with my head down. But I knew then that Marc Aubrion must be part of the resistance, for I saw in him something that could not be contained, not even by his own will. Even then, I saw little reminders of everyone I had ever loved in him: my mother’s quick laughter, my father’s reverence for the pedantic, my sister’s pigheadedness, a boundless joy I had not seen since my schoolyard friends.

  This odd, joyous man—Marc Aubrion—looked around my alley. His eyes went to the bed of old papers I’d made behind my newsstand, and he said to me, “You are like the rats, the alley cats, the cockroaches. They’re the ones who stay alive.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be a cockroach, monsieur,” I said.

  “Sure, you do. Cockroaches were alive long before we were, and they’ll be alive long after. They come out to do their job when it’s required of them, but they return to the ground when it’s over with. They stay alive.” Marc Aubrion put a hand on my shoulder. “Trust me when I say this. You are gamin, like the boldest things on this earth.”

  * * *

  Let me tell you something about my friend Marc Aubrion. Though I have known many writers who were given to stage fright, Aubrion would have found it difficult to define, let alone to experience, that feeling. It did not matter whether the audience laughed at his jokes, or at him: if they were laughing, they belonged to Marc Aubrion. That is not to say that he wasn’t afraid, in the days of Faux Soir. To be alive was to be afraid. Although not every day of the occupation brought us pain—it is easy to forget that now—unpredictability bred our fear. We were trapped inside an arrhythmic heart, holding each other between tremors. Marc Aubrion was afraid, but he was our bouffon, our jester. When the lights went off, he lit a match with a joke.

  As you might imagine, Aubrion’s path to the resistance was fraught with crooks and digressions. Soon after Belgium surrendered to the Germans—when good King Leopold took the crumpled wad of our country out of his pocket and handed it over like money for sweets—the Germans issued a summons. Every newspaper editor in the country was to attend a meeting to discuss “the future of their most noble profession.”

  Upon their arrival, the editors were escorted to a ballroom and shot.

  Paranoid about martyrs, the Nazi High Command ordered the bodies to be cremated behind a courthouse. Aubrion, who had supported his playwriting habit with newspaper articles and theater critiques, was unemployed overnight.

  Then the libraries closed, the fruit stands went away, and the caramel wind no longer blew the carnivals in from the east. The Germans boarded up the playhouses and pubs that had hosted Aubrion’s performances; they took the galleries, the museums, the bookshops. Only the smallest, poorest venues escaped their notice.

  On the outskirts of the city, one such venue—a third-rate art gallery—was hosting an evening show. This gallery was quite run-down, with an ancient curator who often forgot to charge entry fees. The art was not good, but the ticket stubs and flat champagne were evidence that people were still making things, people were still alive. Aubrion went often.

  Even so, he almost decided not to attend this particular show. Some artist or another had made his debut with a new exhibit: Sketches of a Rough Life, simple drawings of farmers with their livestock and plows. That sort of thing infuriated Aubrion. The Nazis permitted artists to work their trade as long as their pens were dull, their canvases simple and muted. Aubrion despised those pallid stories and drawings so popular during the war. But as I’ve heard it told, he’d just had an article rejected by the new resistance paper La Libre Belgique, and he did not want to be alone with himself. So Aubrion walked to the third-rate gallery.

  Although I cannot remember who told me this story, I remember what they said: Aubrion was standing before a painting as large as his body, an oil-on-canvas temple in a land of geysers and mist. And Aubrion was looking at the painting when the air raid siren began to wail.

  How do you i
magine an air raid? They are nothing like that. I experienced so many of them I could sleep through the sirens by the war’s end. I witnessed air raids alone, in the company of friends, with strangers. And it was always the same. You see, an encounter with an air raid is like an encounter with God: they are as mysterious, as unknowable. We accepted these encounters with the same grim finality with which people accept the afterlife. We never tried to run, and we never hid; there were no screams. When the siren wailed, I would look up at the ceiling or sky, as would everyone else, and I would wait. So it was with Aubrion.

  But then it was not the same. If the bomb found him, Aubrion realized, it would find all of them, every piece in the gallery. It would find this painting of the temple, these drawings of the farmers, those sketches, those prints. The bomb would find every mistake the artists tried to cloak in thicker, bolder oils; it would find every triumphant stroke of yellow and green. With each siren’s call, Aubrion knew what the Germans were doing—or rather, what they were undoing.

  I’d often catch Aubrion staring at the piles of brick and concrete that had once been buildings. “The Library of Alexandria dies here every day,” he’d say. But he did not die that day, nor did the painting of the temple, or the sketches of the farmers, or the artists, or the curator. I do not know how Aubrion contacted the Front de l’Indépendance to pledge his service; there were a variety of channels you could use. I only know what the records say: that Marc Aubrion’s service to the FI began a week after that air raid.

  The Nazis may have burned the editors’ bodies, but there is more than one kind of martyr. And some things are much harder to burn.

  20 DAYS TO PRINT

  NIGHT

  The Dybbuk

  THE GRUPPENFÜHRER’S HANDWRITING was not beautiful. His peers used to say he wrote letters like old clowns told jokes. Because of this trait, which had embarrassed him since childhood, Gruppenführer Wolff preferred typewriters to pens. And so the music that accompanied his evenings was the click-click-click-click-snap of mechanical words.

  October 21, —43, he typed. Contacted four targets: Tarcovich, Mullier, Aubrion, Victor. Locations: south Namur fish market, Le Lapin, Great Brabant Theater, Old Church Library. No obstacles. On schedule.

  He slid the paper out of the typewriter. This was a new model, more efficient than the previous. But the typed letters were no more beautiful than Wolff’s penmanship. Wolff studied the thick As and Ns, the pitiless curve of the Gs. Even so, the typewriter was Wolff’s shield: the Gestapo’s psychoanalysts were known to pick through officers’ files, examining their handwriting, pulling apart the officers’ beliefs and insecurities. When forced to make handwritten addenda to his files, Wolff did his best to hide them.

  The Gruppenführer deposited the paper in a folder labeled Memos. Officers of the Reich were expected to keep detailed notes. And so Wolff’s folders swelled dutifully. But because Wolff had seen the consequences of truth-telling in the Gestapo—the whispers, the men carried away in the night, the mysterious suicides—his lies happened compulsively, like a facial tic.

  On that particular evening, however, the Gruppenführer’s memos were more truthful than usual. He had indeed contacted four targets that day, of the names Tarcovich, Mullier, Victor and Aubrion: the smuggler, the saboteur, the professor and the jester.

  The lies started with the locations of Wolff’s targets. Aubrion, for one, was not in the Namur fish market, but was instead at the once-famed Marolles Theater.

  The Jester

  Marc Aubrion had a joke he used to tell. “I am not an honest man,” he would say. “I swore I wouldn’t be caught dead at the Marolles Theater—and I almost was!” It’s a terrible joke, and not in the charming way that English weather is terrible, but actually terrible. We knew that, obviously, but we laughed whenever he told it. Repetition gave it life. Or we were blessed with low standards; I don’t know.

  Speaking of such: the Marolles Theater. Aubrion was sitting in the back row, so if anyone had asked him whether he’d been there that evening, he could have replied, “I popped in for a second to see if I liked it, but had every intention of leaving.” Before the war, the theater had been renowned throughout Belgium for its zwanze plays, of which Aubrion was especially fond. Zwanze, at its heart, is nonsense, treachery, farce; I believe the literal translation from the Dutch is drivel. Zwanze is to the Belgians what Dada is to the Swiss and the Americans. But when the Nazis invaded Belgium, taking our printing presses, our radios, our books, our language, our schools, they erased the line between sense and nonsense. A style of art and humor that had meant everything now meant nothing. And so the Marolles Theater stopped performing the plays Aubrion loved and started performing everything else: shoddy slapstick, poorly done Shakespeare, romantic comedies that seemed to combine the two.

  Aubrion sat with his feet propped on the seat in front of him, watching some adaptation of a Tintin comic strip. It was halfway through the play, so Aubrion was halfway through a bottle of whiskey. Mind you, Aubrion did not drink unless the situation demanded it of him, and in his view, only two situations demanded it of him: unbearably poor plays, and unbearably good ones. When Aubrion worked as a theater critic before the war, he had mostly been plagued by the latter; since he started writing for the resistance paper La Libre Belgique, it was largely the former. But he felt quite strongly that it was his duty to continue supporting the “ill-destined” Marolles.

  In any case, Gruppenführer Wolff directed his men to stand guard at the exits, then took the seat next to Aubrion’s. Onstage, the orchestra struck up a tuneless dance number. Aubrion was trying to figure out how to compose a scathing review of the play that did not betray the fact that he’d actually watched the thing, so he did not notice the Gruppenführer at first.

  When he did, Aubrion said: “Oh, dear God. Is this some sort of immersion-theater gimmick?”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Wolff, unbuttoning his overcoat.

  “Oh, no, no, no. It is, isn’t it? Have we really sunk so low?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Wolff.

  “You’re clearly an actor.” Aubrion took a sip from his bottle, then waved it toward the stage. Patrons who turned to glare and murmur were swiftly deterred by the Gruppenführer’s uniform. “Nazis don’t watch plays, so you must be in it.”

  “I need you to step outside with me, Monsieur Aubrion.”

  “Look, pal, why don’t you go immerse someone who will actually appreciate it?”

  Sighing, Wolff pulled his handgun from its holster. He pressed it into Aubrion’s stomach.

  “Fuck.” Aubrion felt all color and heat drain from his cheeks. “This isn’t a gimmick.”

  “Stand up slowly, please, monsieur.”

  Aubrion followed Wolff’s instructions. “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it. Unless you’re with the papers, in which case I did it really well.”

  “I am with the papers. Come outside, Monsieur Aubrion.”

  The Smuggler

  Lada Tarcovich was with her fourth customer that afternoon when the Gestapo came to call. Shadowed by a dozen men in black uniforms, Gruppenführer Wolff applied his boot to the blush-red door of the brothel, splintering it open. He grimaced at the cloud of dust and shrieks of old wood. A sergeant held his rifle aloft. “Everyone on the floor! On the floor!”

  The Gruppenführer stepped around his soldiers as they rounded up half-clad men and women in scanty dresses.

  “Wait!” cried a bald man with a red nose, silenced by a gun barrel to the chin. The Gruppenführer moved aside as a soldier grabbed a young woman by the arm.

  “Stop,” Wolff said. The soldier let go of the woman—scarcely more than a girl, with plain features and brown hair. Death shone in her eyes. “Where is Madame Tarcovich?”

  “Why do you want to know?” But the child’s defiance shattered like glass. Lowering her eyes, she said, “Madame is upstai
rs.”

  Wolff’s men began mounting the staircase. He waved them back down. “Arrest the men,” he said. “Let the women go.”

  Gruppenführer Wolff found Lada Tarcovich entertaining a bearded man upstairs. Upon seeing Wolff, the man quickly lost interest in his activities and ran from the room. Tarcovich, a small woman with porcelain features that pointed toward an oddly squarish jaw, stood up with no regard for her nudity. She went to a dresser and took out a thin shawl, which she wrapped around her shoulders. Thus clad, Tarcovich sat on the bed, blinking up at Wolff with almond-shaped gray eyes.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said.

  “But you did not run,” replied Wolff.

  “That’s worked quite well for everyone in Europe, hasn’t it?” Tarcovich glanced around Wolff with exaggerated surprise. “You didn’t bring any men?”

  “Downstairs. There’s no place for them here.”

  “I agree, but your Führer does not seem to share my opinion.”

  “Soldiers are for battle. You and I are here to talk about war.”

  Wolff reached into the leather bag slung around his shoulder, pulling out a newspaper—a resistance paper, Tarcovich realized. Her eyes widened. The paper was a charred, crumpled thing. Someone had tied it up in twine, and the unevenness of the sentences and paragraphs made it seem as though the paper was trying to squirm free of its bonds. The Gruppenführer held it out to Tarcovich.

  “You do know what this is,” said Wolff. “Don’t you?”

  “No.” The word was very small. She tried again. “No.”

  “Do you not?”

  “Honest to God.”

  Wolff shook the newspaper. “Take it.”

  Tarcovich took the newspaper. It came apart in her hands.

  “What does it smell like?” asked Wolff.

  Tarcovich closed her eyes and inhaled the newspaper’s remains. She shuddered. “Fire,” she murmured.