The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “That’s what we figure,” said Aubrion, surprised.

  “How—” Wellens stretched out the word how so that it had two syllables “—do you propose to get it?”

  “That is where you come in,” replied Mullier.

  “I see.” Wellens snapped his fingers to indicate that he had an idea. Aubrion did not know anyone who did that besides play-actors. The businessman’s whistling and snapping and pacing—all were accessories to his character, and Aubrion loved them, found them sublimely amusing. But Mullier’s lips never twitched at Wellens’s antics. “The only department that has that kind of money these days is the Nazi Ministry of Education.” The businessman grinned, triumphant.

  “And so?” prompted Aubrion.

  “Why, don’t you see? It’s so easy. The FI can become a school.”

  Mullier blinked at the naked stupidity of that statement. “I do not understand.”

  “All right, all right, listen a moment. Here is what we can do.” Though there was no way anyone in the factory could hear them, Wellens lowered his voice. “We can pose as a group of pro-Nazi Belgians who are building a school to train Hitler youth. We can put together a curriculum, draw up lessons, everything. Then, we can take our plan to the Ministry of Education, pitch our curriculum, and ask them for the supplies we need to open the school.” Smiling, Wellens spread his arms wide. “Good, no? We will need someone with experience in education to help us draw up a convincing curriculum, to justify the funds and such. But if we have that, it can be done.”

  Mullier and Aubrion were too astonished to speak. It was a stupid plan, something that should not have worked at all, so haphazard that it looked dangerous, like a condemned building fashioned into a public library. The Nazis would never, in a thousand years, expect it.

  “Yes,” Mullier finally managed to say.

  “It can be done,” agreed Aubrion.

  The Smuggler

  Lada Tarcovich never spent as much time in courthouses as her twin professions might suggest. She had never been caught smuggling, not once. And prostitution was not illegal in the days of Faux Soir, though it was a useful excuse to accost suspicious-looking women from whom the Gestapo needed information; whenever she took a girl into her care, Tarcovich instructed her on how to avoid attracting unwanted notice. So, on the twenty-fourth of October 1943, Tarcovich walked to a courthouse for the first time to demand an audience with Andree Grandjean, judge at the Court of Appeals.

  It seemed an odd tack to take: throwing good sense over her shoulder the way her superstitious grandmother would have thrown a pinch of salt, marching up to the judge, and asking her to take part in their mad plan. But whenever Lada Tarcovich doubted the wisdom of Aubrion’s schemes, she recalled a conversation they had at the beginning of the war.

  This was before the occupation, before the three weeks of blood that preceded the king’s surrender. The pair sat in Lada’s room in the attic of the whorehouse. Aubrion was hiding out. Aubrion was often hiding out in those days; his brand of satire rankled the sensibilities of wealthier compatriots. It was 1940, that year when politicians were dusting off neutrality and capitulation to hawk like stale bread from their podiums. A small but vocal paper had just released a satirical story called “Please Step Over My Henhouse, Thank You Very Much”; in the story, a chicken that learns of a war between neighboring lions asks politely, in several languages, whether it can remain neutral. The author, one Marc Aubrion, had included a somewhat on-the-nose portrayal of a warthog named after a local governnor. The governor was not pleased. And so Aubrion was hiding out with Tarcovich until the incident faded from public memory, as he had done before and probably would again.

  Aubrion threw a newspaper down on Tarcovich’s nightstand. “Look at him,” he said, nodding at a photograph of King Leopold taking a pen to paper. “What the devil is he writing?”

  “I don’t think he’s writing.” Tarcovich lit a cigarette. “I think he’s signing.”

  “Signing what?”

  “His declaration of neutrality, I assume.”

  “But his pen is poised in the middle of the page. Look there. He doesn’t even have the backbone to pick a side on his own document.”

  Tarcovich laughed. “Don’t be too hard on him, Marc. He’s got a handsome uniform.”

  “He’s an earthworm. He’s less than an earthworm. At least earthworms are useful.”

  Shaking her head, Tarcovich put out her cigarette in a porcelain ashtray. Her attic, where she passed the time between customers, was a slant-roofed cavern of treasures. The shelves were warped from carrying gold-trimmed books, and jewelry boxes, and sculptures. Busts with famous noses and chins occupied each corner. A painting that had been reported stolen from a castle in Germany hung on a crooked nail.

  “Remember Belgium,” Aubrion murmured. The room had little space for furniture: just two chairs and a malnourished nightstand. Aubrion sat backward in one of the chairs; Tarcovich stood leaning on the other. He said again, “Remember Belgium,” taking on the voice of a radio announcer.

  “Don’t be dramatic, Marc,” said Tarcovich. “It’s not dead yet.”

  “No, no, the propaganda campaign—”

  “Oh, from the Great War?”

  “‘The rape of Belgium!’ I hear the posters caused a magnificent stir in America. Do you think the Americans even know where Belgium is?”

  “I wonder sometimes whether Belgians knows where Belgium is. Declaration of neutrality.” The word was oily with contempt. “What the fuck does Leo think he’s doing?”

  “Do you think his mistress calls him Leo?”

  “She doesn’t.”

  Aubrion blinked. “You’re joking.”

  “I don’t joke about business,” said Tarcovich, flatly. She picked up Aubrion’s newspaper, the evening copy of Het Laatste Nieuws. “How long, do you think?”

  “I give it three years until Hitler comes knocking.”

  Tarcovich nodded. Her eyes were somewhere far. “So we have three years,” she said, “to get out.”

  “Yes.” Aubrion walked over to a globe on Tarcovich’s shelf and gave it a spin. “What king’s globe am I defiling?”

  “That? I took it from the king of Monaco.”

  Aubrion laughed. “I have an idea for a play.”

  “I’m not writing another play with you,” said Tarcovich.

  “It’s a two-act farce about four heads of state who try to trick the others into entering a horse race, only the race is rigged. They all think they are the one who will win, so they all enter eagerly, but in the third act—”

  “You said it’s a two-act.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, Lada. It’s a farce. Didn’t I mention that?”

  “When was the last time you finished a play, Marc?”

  “Well, we have three years to work on it, don’t we?” Aubrion grinned, and Lada knew he would walk—he would skip—to the map’s edge, and that she would follow him there, even if there were monsters.

  * * *

  “And who are you?” asked the clerk in the courthouse foyer, snapping Lada out of her reverie.

  “A concerned citizen.” Tarcovich was suddenly aware that her neckline was too low for a concerned citizen. In this vapidly formal building—oak chairs, a small waiting area, windows that had been papered over to protect the glass during air raids—Tarcovich looked out of place, to put it mildly.

  The clerk sighed. He was a balding caricature of a man, the kind of person who became a clerk after being told, since childhood, that he looked like a clerk. “We all are. What do you want?”

  “To speak to Madame Grandjean about a possible fraud.”

  “May I see your forms?”

  Tarcovich faltered. “I’m not sure I feel comfortable sharing such confidential information with someone other than Madame Grandjean.”

  “Then
you will not be sharing this information with Madame Grandjean, either, I’m afraid.” The words I’m afraid came half a second after the rest of the sentence, to ensure Tarcovich knew he didn’t have to be polite, but was doing so out of chivalry. “Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

  “I’m sure there isn’t.” With a nod, Tarcovich left the courthouse.

  She stepped out into the noncommittal fog, which was punctured by a sudden shriek. Tarcovich glanced to her left. Two policemen were dragging a woman up the courthouse stairs. Even from twenty or thirty meters away, Tarcovich could see the woman’s wrists purpling around her handcuffs. As the woman and her captors disappeared into the building, Tarcovich realized—with dread, but with excitement, too—what she needed to do to gain an audience with Andree Grandjean.

  * * *

  As I recall it, the hard part was coming up with a crime. “It can’t be something violent,” said Tarcovich. “No assaults, definitely no murders. No thefts—I wouldn’t do that to a poor shopkeeper. These times are difficult enough.” I watched Tarcovich smoke, thoughtful. “I also do not want to be involved in some dreary protest.”

  Aubrion had been sitting on a table in the basement of the FI headquarters, which the Faux Soir group had held colonized since our first meeting. Our brothers and sisters of the FI were forced to cram themselves into the rooms upstairs, knocking their elbows together as they worked. Aubrion leapt to his feet, pacing. I watched him from my perch atop a broken printing press. He had not slept or eaten in hours; I hadn’t the faintest idea when he’d last showered. No one could work himself into a fit like Marc Aubrion. I often saw him, pacing and muttering and writing, from night until morning. At first light, I’d step across moats of blotting paper to place a mug of coffee on his desk.

  “Why not smuggling?” he said.

  Tarcovich recoiled as though she’d been slapped. “I have never been caught smuggling. I am not about to start.”

  “You’re about to die,” Aubrion said, laughing. “What does your reputation matter?”

  “I am about to die. My reputation is all that matters.”

  Mullier ambled into the room. Aubrion taught me to handle words carefully like glass, so I do not use the word ambled thoughtlessly. Theo Mullier never walked or jogged or trotted; he ambled everywhere, like a lost old man or an inquisitive toddler.

  “Monsieur Mullier?” said Aubrion.

  “Mmm?”

  “A question.”

  “Mmm.”

  “If Lada were to commit a crime, what would that be?”

  He considered. Then: “Automobile theft.”

  Aubrion’s face lit. “Perfect.”

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  THE OLD WOMAN PAUSED, paused, her eyes glittering but downcast—and suddenly, like a thunderclap, or a change of heart, Eliza saw her: the character from the story, Aubrion’s friend, the little roach, the urchin with silver in her pockets. Her face changed; the years that Helene had worn on her forehead and cheeks smoothed over in an instant. It felt like a trick of the light, an optical illusion, and in an instant, it was over. The old woman came back to herself.

  She would not speak, and seemed embarrassed. Eliza asked her about it.

  “Not embarrassed,” said Helene. “But—”

  “Reluctant?”

  “Perhaps. I have not spoken of this, really.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it was—what I did.” Helene closed her eyes. “The fires.”

  “Oh.”

  The old woman sat and breathed, and then she spoke. “This is what I will do. As I told you before, this is not simply a tale of men and women, but of creatures, as well.”

  “Creatures?” Eliza would not say so, but she wondered whether the horror of the war had shaken loose something in the old woman’s mind. But it could not be. She would not believe it.

  “I will tell you about the fires, and about the dybbuk. It took me some time to realize it, I’ll admit, but he and I had more in common than I’d wished. This is my story, and what David Spiegelman, the gastromancer, told me.”

  IN THE TIME

  OF FAUX SOIR

  The Dybbuk and the Girl

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my parents lived six blocks from the University of Toulouse, across from the students’ dormitories. My memories of this time feel secondhand. Every fall, the students would arrive with their carpetbags, and every summer, they would go back the way they came, dragging their bags, stained from the semester, behind them. When the students left, the university sent teams to repair the damage they’d done to the dormitories, and men would blanket the buildings in scaffolding, climbing the wooden skeletons until dawn. On the day they finished, I would come home from the market with my mother, and I’d look up at the dormitories in awe of the transformation: the scaffolding gone, the buildings suddenly new again. One year—1940, to be exact—the University of Toulouse did not send construction workers to repair the dormitories. The Germans saw to that.

  Three months later, my parents were trampled by a crowd of refugees fleeing Toulouse.

  I know nothing of what truly caused the stampede. When the Nazis occupied France, they organized bread lines to distribute rations, and my parents and I queued in our line every morning. But one morning—and this will puzzle me until I die—my parents asked me to stay behind, leaving me on a hill overlooking the town square. It was there I watched the line of filth and skin fracture in the middle, a hairline split that bloomed into chaos. The crowd rushed the Germans at the front of the line, and then they were running for the city gates, pushing, mud in their mouths and on their faces. Someone cried, shrill—“They’re coming!” I think—and when it was over, my parents were gone. I searched for my grandfather, who was supposed to care for me if my parents died; I never found him. But four months later, I found fire.

  Blame L’Ingénue for the first fire I started. It was a popular paper in Toulouse before the Germans came to call, one of those magazines my parents never let me touch and the shopkeepers hid in the backs of their stores. The front of the paper, I remember, looked like a dull finance magazine, and my father was constantly impressed with the editors’ ability to come up with boring headlines (“Are taxes to blame for the rising price of steel?”). The back of the paper betrayed the magazine’s true intentions; as I recall, it featured rather evocative photos of young women who became sartorially sparser as the winds grew colder. Shortly after the death of my family, I was wandering the streets of Toulouse near the Spanish border. I was half-mad with hunger in those days, limping from a bad gash in my leg. The sky made promises that the clouds couldn’t keep, swearing that the rain would stop and the sun would dry my rags. But it rained, and a copy of L’Ingénue blew past me. I followed it toward the river Garonne.

  The rain had dyed the bricks of my city a deeper crimson. I have seen many orphans and refugees in my time, their identities articulated by the holes in their shoes; I was no different. My feet were soaked. Shivering, I leaned against a wall to catch my breath.

  A flicker of orange caught my attention. I squinted. In the distance, someone had built a campfire beneath the wounded stone roof of a church. Closing my eyes, I heard their voices: a strange, otherworldly peal of laughter in the deserted city. Of course, the only people who had occasion to laugh in my city were the people who had destroyed it, but I was too ill to contemplate such things, and I started toward the campfire. L’Ingénue joined me.

  When I was close enough to see their uniforms, my heart froze in my chest. The men who sat laughing around the campfire wore the same boots and patches as the men who’d marched across my home. I did not know them as Nazis, not yet. But their identities would not have mattered to me. They were beasts that spoke in an odd tongue and put their hands where they did not belong. I crouched behind a headless statue, watching the men gather armfuls of
discarded paper to feed their fire. The evening was so cold that even from such a distance, probably two hundred meters, I could feel the warmth. The flames struck me as beautiful: clean and bright, with no mistakes.

  I became aware of a pile of supplies behind the men, nestled up against the church. They had packages of food, barrels of water and wine, guns and bullets, and red canisters I had seen them pour onto buildings before dousing them with their flamethrowers. L’Ingénue sidled over to their camp, whispering for me to follow. I waited for the men to be distracted, to laugh again, then I sprinted from my perch, throwing myself behind the supplies. Dizzy, I clutched at my chest, waiting for my heart to slow. To my welcome surprise, the men showed no sign of having noticed me.

  Breathing hard, I lifted one of the red canisters, staggering under its weight. It could not have weighed that much, now that I think about it, but I was a child, you see, and so hungry. As the men sat with their backs to me, I crept over to L’Ingénue and poured kerosene across the pages. Then I ran behind the camp and back to the headless statue, kneeling behind the stone.

  I did not wait long. One of the men, who had the characteristic gait of the nearly drunk, picked up L’Ingénue. Someone made a joke. As they all laughed, the almost-drunk man answered with another—I can still hear the words: Wenn ich besaß eine frau!—and threw L’Ingénue onto the flames.

  I do not know what I expected to happen. I knew there would be fire, or rather more fire, and I knew that was what I wanted. I wanted my parents, and my bed, and the sandwiches my father used to make, the ones with eggs and cheese, and I wanted the smells of my city, and because I couldn’t have any of it, I wanted these men to hurt. But beyond that, I am not sure that I had a concrete idea of what would happen once they fed L’Ingénue to their campfire.