The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  The Smuggler

  Anyone who happened to walk the streets of downtown Enghien that day would’ve seen what appeared to be—what were—twenty-five whores carrying Nazi tapestries and statues of Hitler out of an auction house. It had been Mullier’s suggestion; though they were purportedly raising money for a German organization, the saboteur believed the Nazi trimmings would make guests feel threatened and uncomfortable. Aubrion had agreed: “That’s the thing about Nazis. Strip off the uniform, and they’re everyone’s best friend.” As Lada’s girls cleaned and prepared for the fund-raiser, Tarcovich supervised, flanked by Andree Grandjean.

  “I plan to have everything cleared out by the end of the day,” said Tarcovich. “They should be finished well before the fund-raiser begins.”

  Grandjean eyed the heavy wood furniture surrounding them. Now that they’d started clearing away the remains of the Ahnenerbe’s presence, it was clear that the building was in poor shape. Years of misuse had left the ceilings cracked and the floorboards groaning.

  “Do you think that’s possible?” asked the judge. “It seems ambitious.”

  “That never stopped you, did it?” Lada kissed her and rested her head on Andree’s shoulders, breathing in the wonder of her, the way Lada seemed to fit right there, right against her cheek, like she was molded for it.

  “Hey, lovebirds!”

  Tarcovich broke away. A group of her girls were laughing at her, making rude gestures with their fingers and tongues.

  “Lazy bitch.” One grinned. “Aren’t you going to give us a hand?”

  “I’ve given you lot a job,” said Lada Tarcovich.

  They laughed again, carrying an old wooden table out the door. Tarcovich smiled. It was a rare thing to hear them laugh. These girls were young, most of them just children—too young to be working at all, let alone in this trade. Though she rarely let on, it tortured Lada Tarcovich to use them this way. “I’m giving them some money, a home,” she’d say to Marc Aubrion, “but what are the costs of such things?” He’d try to assure her that she was doing the best she could, but these girls and their stories followed Tarcovich to bed each night.

  The air swelled with the clamor of church bells. Tarcovich cursed.

  “What?” said Andree Grandjean. “What is it?”

  “Oh, nothing. I don’t have much time here,” said Tarcovich.

  “Why not?”

  “The stag party is this evening. I’d managed to forget.”

  “What stag party?”

  “It’s all part of some fool plan Marc Aubrion dreamed up.”

  Putting a hand to her aching forehead, Lada turned away from Andree. She couldn’t imagine how many hours she would not spend with this woman because she was off planning some manic caper for this suicide operation. Part of her—a very large part of her, she could not deny—ached to end it all entirely. She could cut ties with the FI, smuggle herself and Grandjean out of the country. It would not be much of a life—and that was assuming they made it across the border—but it would be a life, and she could wake up in this woman’s bed.

  Grandjean leaned forward to murmur into her hair: “What’s the matter?”

  “I do not want to go,” said Lada. She smiled, kissed Andree’s cheek. “What time is it? I wasn’t listening.”

  “It’s half past nine,” said Grandjean. “On the thirty-first of October. In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-three.”

  “Who the devil has a November wedding?”

  Grandjean laughed, then regarded the walls—which were white, now that they’d cleared away all the evidence of German conquest—and the polished oak floors. “The place is clearing up nicely. How did you find so much help in such a short time?”

  Tarcovich snorted. “I’ve discovered something remarkable. When given a choice between catering to the whims of sweaty old men and carrying around paintings of sweaty old men, people tend to choose the latter.”

  Grandjean shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “Are these women—”

  Tarcovich folded her arms across her chest. “Are these women what?”

  Glancing around, Andree lowered her voice. “Prostitutes?”

  “What are you whispering for? Are you afraid they’ll find out?”

  “Well, are they?”

  “Prostitutes?” Tarcovich said, louder than she’d ever said it, three sharp syllables that both affirmed her identity and fled from it. “Yes, of course they are.”

  “You couldn’t get someone else?”

  “Someone else?” Tarcovich mocked, childish. She reveled in the hurt in Andree’s eyes, then despised herself. “Who else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whores and escorts. Like it or not, it’s what we’ve got to work with. Anything more is too expensive. Anything less is too dangerous.”

  “I suppose.” Grandjean drifted away from Lada.

  “What’s the matter with you? Andree, wait.” Lada caught Grandjean’s arm, searching her face. In a heartbeat, Andree had become an empty book again, pages without words, just as she’d been when Lada first met her. Tarcovich spoke quickly, willing her to come back. “Andree, listen. These are good girls, you must believe that. They’re reliable. They’re not going to steal anything. What more could we want for this job?”

  Andree took a breath. “You didn’t ask me.”

  “Ask you what? You are not FI. It’s none of your concern.”

  “But Lada,” Andree hissed, “I don’t agree with it.”

  “Prostitution?”

  “Yes.” Andree licked her lips. “Prostitution.” She said it the way tightrope walkers take their first step.

  “Well, neither do I.”

  “Then why are you doing this? Any of this?”

  “Do you agree with everything that’s written up in the law?”

  “No, but—”

  “Oh, allow me to guess. But this is different, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Why? Because you get to work with your clothes on?”

  “I have to leave.” Grandjean ripped her coat off the back of a chair. She put her arm through the wrong sleeve twice, three times. Her face was twisted up by something—anger? fear?—that Lada could not discern. “There is somewhere I have to be.”

  “You don’t work today.”

  “I work every day, Lada.” Grandjean’s voice crumpled with tears. “As do you, I’m sure.”

  Tarcovich wanted to go to her, felt her fingers twitch with the impulse to hold Grandjean’s hand—already a reflex, already like breathing. Instead, she let her go, trembling under the weight of all that had been said. Perhaps this quarrel would cut their bonds. That was how it always happened in the stories; the couple fought, exchanging forbidden angers like wedding vows—and that was it. These storybook quarrels were magic, freeing the lovers of hard choices and compromise and disappointment. Lada prayed it would be so.

  The girls watched Lada stand there for a long while. They came and went, laughing in rooms far away, while Tarcovich stood without moving in the cold quiet of the old auction house.

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  THE OLD WOMAN had been swaying to the rhythm of her story. But here she sat upright, the ancient leatherwork of her voice smoothing into uniform grains.

  “You already know something of Professor Victor,” said Helene, “or you would not have found me. But you do not know all.”

  Something in the tenor of Helene’s words alarmed Eliza. “I know he was sick—”

  “That is not the whole story.”

  “I know his journals survived to carry the legacy of Faux Soir.”

  The old woman’s laugh was as dark as the sky in this new world, where the streetlights outshone t
he stars. “The legacy.”

  “What else would you call it?”

  “I hope you are not writing such nonsense in that notebook.”

  Eliza took a breath. “Did Victor do something to hurt Aubrion and the others?”

  “He did,” said Helene simply.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “I guess I—”

  “Don’t be. Every man and woman alive in those days did something hurtful. Oh, don’t look like that. We speak of the war in such grand terms now—good, evil, legacies.” Eliza blushed at Helene’s ridicule. “But to us, each day was just a day. I had a ball and paddle that I played with, sometimes. Other times, I loaded rifles for the men.”

  “What did Victor do?” asked Eliza.

  “Before I go on, you should know the truth of it. I learned some of his story from a diary I found after it was all over. Aubrion told me the rest. This is what I know.”

  3 YEARS BEFORE

  FAUX SOIR

  The Professor’s Witness

  THE CLAMOR OF the train no longer disturbs Victor. He can even sleep now, if he wishes. This is the fourth day of his travels, the fourth night he will make a pillow of his coat to lie upon the seat. The engine’s fury lends him an awful privacy, so he rarely hears the other passengers’ voices. He feels truly apart from this world.

  A young couple is traveling in the car adjacent to Victor’s. Their child’s cries are so much worse than the train engine. She is quiet for hours, and then he hears her sobs again. Victor knows the child is a girl because he has heard her parents begging her please, Dottie, please, sleep. Victor has come to feel as though the child is pursuing him to Poland, through the country and into Katowice. Sometimes he wakes, certain her cries have roused him. But he hears nothing but the train.

  There has been no time to write to Sofia. Victor’s every hour is occupied by what he must do. The matter is clear enough, but it grows clearer when expressed in ink. The professor writes in his notebook:

  The FI has received reports from the Comité de Défense des Juifs that the Germans are pressing Jews into some unholy service. We have heard similar reports about other sorts of downtrodden—Roma, homosexuals, loose women, orphans. Once captured, the prisoners are forced onto trains bound for southwestern Poland. I’ve heard they only take healthy ones, sturdy young men and women with strong backs, which suggests the Germans engage them in some manner of hard labor. They are building something, perhaps. The men of the FI have taken to whispering about super-weapons. Though the concept of the thing tilts precariously toward the absurd, it is not too far beyond the realm of possibility, not in these strange times.

  My task is a simple one. I am to find out where the trains are going, so that the armies of Europe may know where to direct their aeroplanes. If I have it in my power to do so, I am also to find out what the Germans are building. It shall take no more than a week, of this I am certain. As God is my witness, there will be more than enough time to write to Sofia.

  * * *

  Katowice is a forgettable city. The matronly shops and homes squat beneath electric cables that are strung like fat cobwebs. A faint smell of something sweet, unpleasantly so, clings to everything. Where there are trees, the brush has faded to an underachieving gray. Victor’s inn is situated behind a clump of such trees.

  The professor arrives at the inn unmolested. His papers pass through the hands of Nazi officials without incident; the FI is a large and clumsy organization, by Victor’s estimation, but it is somehow adept at what it does. Other passengers on the train to Katowice were less fortunate. The couple from before, crying Dottie’s parents, had shown their papers at the border. His were in order; hers were not. Victor writes in his notebook: Lord protect her. As in the days of Solomon, the fair ones suffer most.

  He takes his lunch at a bistro three blocks from the train station. As he returns to the inn, Victor’s skin feels too tight, his hands and feet pinpricked with fear. Of course, the professor had known, prior to coming here, that the Germans had occupied Katowice. But he had not known the profound, oppressive silence that comes with it. Victor walks alongside other men and women and children in the chapped and fallible streets, and the silence is unbearable, but also thin and crackling as though it aches to burst forward in a spectacular display. The professor examines the faces that pass him. They are ordinary faces, some ugly, some fine. The same lot populates every city on this earth, regardless of how conventional or how foreign their customs. But the sounds of life—the meaningless chatter, the gossip, the pleasure, the bickering—have fled these streets for somewhere safer. These people do not speak.

  It has long been a quality of mine that I am not given to fear, Victor writes, back at the inn. This is not boasting but a statement of fact. Sofia used to say it takes a certain measure of fearlessness to stand between scientists and philosophers with one’s fist raised, and that is precisely what I have done. But by God, I am fearful of what the occupation has brought to this city.

  Victor sits on his bed and remembers the day the swastika came to Belgium. Like his countrymen, he had sheltered in his home until the fighting was done and the countryside trampled, until the men shouted through the windows that they could come out, that they would not be shot. Sofia had remarked on their thick accents, their poor grammar. His Sofia did not go out, but Victor did. They’d needed bread and other things. Victor remembers walking to the bakery and avoiding his neighbors’ eyes, as though he had brought shame on them and could only pray they might forgive him. But without the benefit of his neighbors’ confirmation, he grew paranoid that the occupation never happened, that it was something devised by his feeble mind, that he was the only one who knew of it. Victor’s eyes lifted, he remembers, and he looked at them, his brothers and sisters in Christ. He looked for some flickering candle of recognition, a sign that this truly did happen, that it was not simply his imagination. And he found it. He finds it. He finds it in their footsteps, quiet and relenting.

  * * *

  I do not know where to begin. I sit alone in my room, where there is no desk, only a bed and a trunk and a thin carpet. The FI gave me what they had, which was not much. I am traveling with merely enough money for food and simple lodging. My notebook is in my lap. I’ve started a letter to Sofia, given it up. My notebook is filling like the belly of Jonah’s whale. I hesitate to write it all down, for fear of making it true. But writing it will make no difference. The laws of nature are extant regardless of whether men capture them in ink. Gravity binds us to the earth; Newton did not make it true. God created the Heavens; the prophets did not make it true.

  I shall begin in the bistro, where I met four men from the Service du Travail Obligatoire. It seemed risky to me, four Frenchmen traveling together in the city. But it appeared to me, after I watched them for a time, that they needed each other for what they were about to do. I saw it in their posture, the way they addressed me by name but murmured among themselves.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Where are the labor camps?”

  The men stared into their glasses. I’d bought a round of ale. It seemed the Christian thing to do.

  “There are no labor camps,” said the oldest of the men. I made a note of his name, but it is smudged, and I cannot read it now.

  “None? Then where are the Jews?”

  Another man spoke. He sounded as though he were talking in his sleep. “They are being killed, sent to gas chambers.” None of the Frenchmen would look at me. They had eyes for someone else, someone who was not with us. “Their bodies are being burned, not far from here. Our children ask about the smell.”

  “Gas chambers?” It was all I could say. The concept was self-explanatory, but the idea—the very notion—that someone would think of such a thing and then put it into practice—it was unfathomable to me. It is unfathomable to me. “How long?” I whispered.

  “A long time,
” said the first man, the older one. His fist was curled on the table. “We thought you knew—that the resistance knew. Why has no one come for them?”

  I could not answer the man’s question. In truth, I do not know why we haven’t come for them, why we haven’t heard their cries. After I left the bistro, the existence of these camps—not labor camps, death camps—seemed obvious to me. The German purpose is the creation of a “perfect” race. This is, of course, a farce, but the only way to perpetuate the farce is by cleansing, by moving away from imperfection. Labor camps would have delayed the inevitable. Labor camps would have been inefficient.

  It has been two weeks since I’ve heard from Sofia. Has her illness passed? Is her sister looking after her? Forgive me—although this is not a journal in which to deposit private notions and conversations, it helps me to write things out, to see them and turn them over. I have been thinking about Sofia and whether she is well. Sofia told me, before I departed, that it was not the illness that plagued her; rather, it was the shallowness of feeling one heartbeat where there had been two. I wonder what she would have looked like. We had planned to name her Eliza.

  The name of the camp has followed me, will not leave me in peace. It chased me back to the inn; it hung in the air like the scent of death on an undertaker’s gloves; it formed on the colorless lips of every child, woman, and man I saw—Auschwitz, they said, Auschwitz. I’ve sent a letter to the FI asking whether I am to travel there, but I have packed already.

  * * *

  There is nothing new in this world; there are only new ways of looking at it. Victor and his body sit outside Auschwitz. He has never thought to separate them before, Victor and his body, but they have been cleaved apart by some boundless force, by the shock. There are only new ways of looking, Victor says to someone, Université Catholique de Louvain, the new field of sociology, class of 1920 maybe, though it was so long ago. Everything on this earth, Victor says to someone, has been witnessed by God, and because this is so, God has accepted everything in it—or He does not exist, but this is impossible. Sofia has often listened—so patiently and so skeptically!—to this very lecture. And if He has seen things, then Victor has an academic and spiritual obligation to accept and understand this new world. Does that make sense, everyone? Any questions? God has witnessed the striped children, and the naked trees, and the concrete rooms from which they must be carried out. God has accepted the bars of soap unused and stale on the shelves, and the barbed wire, and the starved bones, and the little ones, and the old ones, and the smells. Humans are not new, and human behaviors are not new—Victor explained it all in his research proposal, six pages, typed, formatted, edited by Sofia as she sipped tea over her swelling belly—but we have hitherto failed to examine ourselves through the lens of science: If we can delve into ourselves and discover the forces at work, Victor wrote, the pushes and pulls that beget conflict or love, we can begin to water the parched soil of our humanity.