With a sigh, Aubrion passed her the glass. She finished off its contents.
“Marc?”
“Hmmm?”
“What are we doing?”
“Getting drunk.”
“No, we are definitely not doing that.”
“Yes, we are.”
“We have to work tomorrow. Today. What time is it?”
“Work be damned.”
Through an agreeable haze, Tarcovich looked around at the chalkboards that lined the walls. Someone had drawn a caricature of Hitler on one of them, adjacent to a diagram showing the layout of tomorrow’s pamphlets. The Allies had started dropping propaganda leaflets on both sides, strafing the countryside alongside bullets and bombs: the pamphlets shone bright with tales of bravery and dirty pictures for our lads, and lies and misdirections for theirs. FI artists were responsible for many of the leaflets. It was some of Aubrion’s favorite work.
“Remember when the war started,” Tarcovich mumbled, “and the king signed that—”
“The declaration of neutrality!”
“We were at the whorehouse together. Do you remember? In the attic.” Tarcovich closed her eyes, remembering Aubrion with two bottles of good beer and no war, not yet. “My God, that was ages ago.”
“The whorehouse has an attic?” said Aubrion.
Tarcovich’s eyes snapped open. “So, you don’t remember.”
“Of course I do. We were thinking of getting out.” Aubrion threw an arm over his face. Tarcovich had watched him do that a thousand times, a gesture of finality, exhaustion. She was bound to this man by her knowledge of his mannerisms and habits; they were inexorably tied, those two, imprisoned by a connection neither had named. He was funny; he cared for her in ways that surprised even himself. She told him when to get a haircut; she smacked him on the head when he said something he did not mean. “Well,” Aubrion went on, “I suppose that’s not true. We were talking about getting out. I don’t think either of us is truly so wise. There was going to be a pamphlet, or something, that we were planning to write.”
“What happened to that idea?” asked Tarcovich.
“What happens to any of them?”
“True.” Tarcovich lay back, looking up at the concrete ceiling. “How many papers do you think we’ll sell?” she said, somewhat lazily. “Before the Gestapo realizes the country is laughing at them and goes after the names on the paper.”
Aubrion stretched out on the floor. “We’re not using our real names, are we?” He rolled over onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow.
“I’ve never known you not to use your real name.”
“There was that time in Brussels—”
“Not even then.”
“Damn. Am I really so vain?”
“Yes. So, how many, do you think?”
“I dunno.” Aubrion pushed his hair out of his eyes. When he was a boy, his mother took him to a barber twice a month. His eyes drifted to a crack in the concrete floor. “I thought Noël patched that.”
“Patched what?”
Aubrion pointed at the crack. “It looks rather like a smile, I think.” He did this often, seeing things in the world that weren’t there, or making them up. It drove Noël mad: Aubrion’s tendency to point out hidden pictures, seeing the world as a madman’s canvas. Tarcovich never told the others how she loved him for it. “Or a frown, if you look at it the other way.”
“Fine.” Tarcovich got up, collecting Aubrion’s glass. She switched off the recording radio, which had been wheezing old Polish songs into the dank air. “You don’t feel like having this conversation. I understand.”
“What conversation?” As Tarcovich started toward the stairs, Aubrion twisted around on the floor. “Wait, Lada, what conversation are you talking about?”
“I was asking about Faux Soir,” Lada said over her shoulder.
“What about it?”
“How many copies—”
“I don’t know.”
“See, you don’t feel like it.” Tarcovich paused at the foot of the staircase, turning slowly to face Aubrion. She felt claustrophobic, like they were locked in a room without a light or a map, privy only to shadows on the wall. “Listen here,” said Tarcovich, and her eyes had no mercy for Aubrion, “before this is all over—and it’s going to be over far quicker than you think—you need to come to terms with everything.”
“Everything?” said Aubrion. “Lada, do you believe I’m doing this, any of this, because I think we’re going to be successful?”
“If you don’t think we’re going to be successful—”
“No, no.” Aubrion massaged his forehead. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“That our success or failure doesn’t matter to me.”
“Then what does?”
“My God, Lada, you see them, too. The sad man who lost his wife last winter, the one who lines up at the butcher shop every Friday to get his meat rations. The women who get excited because the coats at the general shop are half-off, coats someone stole from the back of some dead refugee. The man at the coffeehouse downtown who takes his cup alone, and you know it’s the grandest part of his day...”
Tarcovich glanced away. “What of it?”
“They have fallen into a routine. The routine of subjugation.”
“Oh, God, Marc, don’t start.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.”
“But listen. Even if we sell one copy, even if the man at the butcher shop reads it, nods along, and tosses it away, I’ll be happy. He’ll be happy, for a second. We will have broken the routine. Don’t you see? We can show him that there’s something else, that his life is not just the Reich and meat on Fridays. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Of course it does.”
“But?”
“But that is not my point.” Lada Tarcovich looked down at the floor, then back up at Aubrion. Her eyes were rimmed in red. “Listen here. My mother once told me a story of my grandmother, who was executed by the Russians in Lithuania. Grandmother knew she would be shot five minutes before it happened. That was how quickly she was sentenced, they were all sentenced, in those days. And my mother, bless her, she always wondered how Grandmother passed those last five minutes. Did she suddenly believe in God? Did she wish she’d—I don’t know—tried that recipe she’d been putting off? What did she think, or feel, before she could never think or feel again?” Tarcovich took Aubrion’s hands. His touch came to her in an echo. “This is your last five minutes, Marc. I only wish you could see that.”
Aubrion said nothing. Tarcovich was asking something of him, he knew; but that was the limit of his understanding. Aubrion felt her hands leave him, and it was as though he’d missed something, that the train had pulled out of the station without him, that he’d skipped a few pages in the middle of the book.
“She might not have felt anything out of the ordinary,” he said, finally. “Your grandmother, before she died. She might have been thinking of the weather, if it was a nice day.”
“I suppose she might have,” said Tarcovich, her expression softening.
The Smuggler
They sat together for a time, until Tarcovich asked, “Have you thought about writing obituaries?”
“I know we aren’t going to make it, Lada,” said Aubrion, “but don’t you think that’s a tad premature?”
“For Faux Soir, you dolt.”
“Oh. You mean satirical obituaries? How interesting,” said Aubrion, and Tarcovich adored his unwitting smile. “So-and-so of Enghien, a loyal man of the town, died this afternoon following a long, heroic battle with his wife’s chocolate mousse—”
Tarcovich laughed.
“—which had rendered him incapable of walking without erupting in a series of wheezing gasps his friends ofte
n mistook for French.”
Tarcovich countered: “So-and-so of Brussels, an immigrant from the Mongol lands, died last night in a German air raid. The enterprising Germans, who had intended to bomb Allied territories, missed their target, and as a result, poor so-and-so died laughing.”
Aubrion leaned against the wall to bear the weight of his own laughter, then stopped suddenly. “I cannot write that.”
“Why ever not?”
“Far too many people have died. I cannot poke fun at death, especially not when these people—” he gestured around him, at the imaginary schoolchildren, the butcher, a lamplighter being questioned by a pair of Nazis, their script now routine “—will be reading it. It is too much. Spiegelman could do it—”
Tarcovich was incredulous. “Spiegelman, whose family died, whose people are dying?”
“I cannot, Lada. That’s all I have to say about the matter.”
She did not have the strength to press him. Tarcovich let her mind go free. The churches outside, surly and familiar beneath the clouds, chimed needfully. She’d usually cover her ears against the din, but suddenly the bells reminded her too much of Andree Grandjean. Those bells had chimed to awaken them the first time they’d laid together, so now the bells tasted of Andree, smelled of her, of awaking to each other’s lips—nonsense. Lada had heard those bells a thousand times, of course, having lived in Enghien since childhood. But she’d never before associated them with a person, a face. The bells belonged to Andree now, as did everything else in the world.
After a time, Tarcovich said, “You know what, Marc? It really does.”
“It does what?” said Aubrion.
Tarcovich nodded at the crack in the floor. “Look like a smile.”
11 DAYS TO PRINT
MORNING
The Pyromaniac
SOMEONE NUDGED ME AWAKE. I rolled over, instructing them to do something obscene and anatomically impossible. They responded by applying their boot—gently, but persuasively—to my backside.
“What d’you want?” I snapped, rubbing the exhaustion from my eyes.
Aubrion and Victor were standing over me. The latter held chalk and a slate; the former held a bundle of blue-and-white cloth. Aubrion’s hair stood up in apoplectic protest; Victor’s glasses sat, partially capsized, on his twice-broken nose.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Aubrion threw the cloth at me. I held it up, realizing with dread that it was a pair of trousers and a shirt: one of those ridiculous little sailor uniforms that were popular until people realized they were dressing their children like men who rarely bathed and often died of syphilis. Making my disgust clear, I fingered the oversized lapels, the white stripe on the navy trousers, the starched shirt and cartoon buttons.
“You should put it on now,” said Victor, “so you will be comfortable in it this afternoon.”
“What’s happening this afternoon?”
Aubrion smiled apologetically. “We’ve decided it would be a good idea to have a model student in our educational program, Schule für die Whatever-the-Devil. To show the Germans how effective and jolly good and all-around wonderful it is.”
I held up the sailor outfit again. When I was very young, long before the Germans came to Toulouse, I had a fascination with the mythology of the Norse. One story in particular captured my attention, a tale in which the mighty Thor is forced to masquerade as a giant’s bride. Even now, the memory of my father reading this story to me, raising his voice to a strained falsetto and then down to a cavernous grumble, is agonizingly clear, as though it happened yesterday and could happen again tomorrow. I thought of the story then, sitting on the floor of the FI basement with my lap covered in stiff white-and-blue fabric, and I felt, for all the world, like a god of thunder about to put on a wedding dress.
“It has ribbons,” I said.
Victor sniffed. “Wearing a uniform is perfectly respectable. Many schoolchildren wear something similar, and have for centuries.”
“With respect, monsieur, many schoolchildren eat paste, as well.”
I bathed out of a tub Tarcovich set up in the basement. For reasons that were obvious only to me, I insisted on privacy. My morning ablutions rarely involved anything more than a cursory wash-up; soldiers of the resistance did not bathe. The thought of soaking in a tub like a swollen hausfrau felt like a wretched humiliation. But my body sank low into the warm water. I scrubbed myself until I was raw-red and smelled of lye. I had not taken a bath since Toulouse. I had forgotten it was even possible in this world.
When I finally extracted myself from the water, I put on that damned uniform. I then turned to look at myself in the mirror on the wall of the FI’s water closet; someone got drunk one night and threw a bottle at it, so a thin crack split the glass with a frown of disapproval. Mute with shock, I studied myself—for I looked nothing like me. I looked like a lie, an artist’s representation of what my life might have been if not for the war. I rubbed my cheek, newly liberated from a smudge of dirt. For weeks, I’d assumed my neck and face were latticed in bruises, but the water had revealed the truth: it was filth that had sunk its teeth into my flesh. So too had the bath exposed my pallor, that I was in dire need of more food, chronically dehydrated—and yet my body somehow looked more complete than it had before, a filled-in version of who I had been before the war. All that was missing was my long hair. I pulled at the stubborn weeds on my scalp. I cannot say I longed for the blond tresses that would return me to who I was before Toulouse; that is not quite right. Instead of longing, or wondering, I felt unfinished: crouched between the Helene of then and the Gamin of now.
Aubrion called down the stairs into the basement. “Gamin, are you still down there?”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat and said, loudly this time: “Yes, monsieur. You can come down now.”
Aubrion and Tarcovich appeared at the foot of the stairs. For a time, they said nothing. Then Aubrion’s head tilted, and he emitted: “Oh.”
“Oh?” I said.
“You look—”
“He looks precious,” said Tarcovich.
“You should have something.” Aubrion handed me some day-old pastries wrapped in newspaper. Though none of us had our fill of food, my belly rarely ached in the days of Faux Soir. Tarcovich fetched me hot chocolate, Noël left me little sandwiches of butter and cured meat, and my dear Aubrion had his pastries, always pastries, an endless and mysterious supply.
“Now what, monsieur?” I asked with my mouth full.
“Now, we make you respectable.”
* * *
“All right, ladies and gents,” said René Noël. “Everyone knows their parts?”
Victor, Spiegelman, Tarcovich, Aubrion and Wellens nodded; Mullier didn’t nod, but he also didn’t not nod, so everyone interpreted this as assent. Though the basement was frigid with early morning air, I could feel my shirt and coat growing heavy with perspiration.
The professor instructed me to stand before a chalkboard. I’d heard him up with the moon, passing another night without sleep. Like me—like most of us, really—Victor had nowhere else to go. He had sat alone in the basement, ill and shivering with his memories. As Noël reiterated the day’s plan, I watched Victor concentrate on breathing.
“Spiegelman?” said Noël.
“I’m playing an instructor.”
“Tarcovich?”
“Also an instructor.”
“Wellens?”
“The director.” (Direct-tah.)
“Victor?”
The professor took a breath, pausing half a second too long, so everyone turned to look at him. He manufactured a smile. “Associate director,” he said.
Noël peered at him with his owl’s eyes. “Are you quite in one piece, Victor?”
“A bit tired, is all.”
“We shall have to pour some coffee into you. Aubrion,
who are you playing?”
“Playing?”
“In the school caper, Marc. Christ Almighty, pay attention.”
“Oh, right, yes. An instructor. Right?”
“Yes. Thank you. Mullier?”
“Aide.”
“Gamin?”
I shifted in my uniform. “A student.”
“Good.” Noël rubbed his hands together. “Now, the books—the, um, the pornography—they’ve been covered so that they look like textbooks, but try not to open them too widely.”
“Why not?” Ferdinand Wellens asked through his beard.
Tarcovich smirked. “Some of them are illustrated.”
“Remember,” said Noël, “our goal is to get the Ministry of Education to commit as much paper and ink as they can spare, so please, whatever you do, stress the fact that these young, impressionable youths need materials to learn to read and write and be productive robotniks of the Reich. Everyone clear?”
“So, Gamin,” said Aubrion, “when the lads from the Ministry ask what you’ve learned in your time as our pupil, what will you say?”
My brief time in primary school seemed a thousand kilometers away. I searched my memory for what I’d learned there. “Sums?”
“No,” said Martin Victor, “you tell them that you’ve learned obedience to the Führer.”
“That’s Hitler, right?”
“God help us,” muttered Tarcovich, getting up to straighten my lapels.
“Yes, but you should only ever refer to him as the Führer,” said Victor.
“Walk for us,” said Tarcovich. “So we can fix your posture.”
Feeling immensely foolish, I walked five steps, turned around, and walked five more.
“How was that?” I asked.
“Terrible,” said Tarcovich.
Aubrion said, “I thought it was fine.”
“Of course you did.” Tarcovich placed one hand on my back and one on my chest. Then, with strength I did not know she had, she pushed me up and back so my bones cracked and my spine threatened to go on strike. “That’s better, isn’t it? Now walk again.”
I started to walk. Before I could attempt my third step, Tarcovich stopped me.
The Ventriloquists Page 20
