The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  That is Victor’s belief. He has written justifications of sociology before, he shall do it again, he shall probably write them on his own grave. The professor—profess, declare publicly, profiteri—does what he does because it is a sacred thing. That was too unscientific for the research proposal, but that did not stop him from explaining it during his dissertation defense, from believing it, from holding it like a prayer in his heart. How can one read about our history, Sofia, about the noble Egyptians, the wars between the Persians and the Greeks, how can one look at the pottery and the stonework, how can one sing the epics, how can one read the bawdy jokes graffitied on the ancient walls, how can one do any of these things without being moved to study human life?

  We are strange and beautiful specimens; that was Victor’s belief. It stood beside him like a steadfast companion. It took turns holding his notebook, witnessing his agony and peace. I’ve lost my friend. I cannot find him now.

  10 DAYS TO PRINT

  AFTERNOON

  The Professor

  JUND, ROYER AND Hoch from the Ministry of Education greeted Victor across the street from the Nazi headquarters with a handshake and a bundle of documents. The professor signed them unread. Smiling, Jund handed him an envelope.

  “It contains a key to a warehouse just east of here,” he said. “The paper and ink for your school will be delivered there in two days’ time.”

  Tucking the envelope into his tweed coat, Victor proceeded to the office of August Wolff. He had a shuffling, oversized walk, of which he felt quite self-conscious, and when he wore a hat—as he did on this day—he pulled it low on his face, so as to cover his eyes. The professor crossed a street, and a cart shot around a corner and nearly bowled him over. Wiping an indignant spot of mud from his coat, he carried on to the Nazi headquarters.

  “Professor.” August Wolff greeted Victor in the foyer. His footsteps were so quiet he might have been walking on velvet rather than brick. Armed guards paced nearby. “Thank you for meeting me here.”

  “Of course, Gruppenführer.”

  Wolff tucked an envelope in Victor’s hand. It matched Jund’s almost exactly. Aubrion might have wondered about how the Reich ordered their stationery.

  “The five thousand francs I promised you,” said Wolff, “for La Libre Belgique.”

  “We will use it well, I assure you.”

  “I’ve no doubt of that. Now, is there anything else?”

  “Yes, actually.” Victor took a third envelope from his coat, noting with surprise that Wolff did not flinch as the professor reached into his pocket. The envelope was made of coarser stuff than the Reich’s. “Gruppenführer, if you wouldn’t mind—” Shaking his head, Victor thrust the envelope in Wolff’s hands. “Read it, please.”

  Wolff nodded. His eyes were Aryan steel—but Victor did not believe in the “Aryan” race, the false mythology that the Germans had conjured. It defied everything the professor had labored over; it was a knife in the back of honesty and truth. Victor looked away as the Gruppenführer said, “At your service, Professor.”

  The Dybbuk

  August Wolff marveled at the professor’s handwriting. The curls were delicate, unafraid to bow when the situation demanded it of them. But other lines, the cross of the T and the backbone of the I, were resolute and firm. It was several minutes before the Gruppenführer paid any attention to the content of the letter, partially because of his admiration, but largely because he already knew what it would say. Victor’s letter read:

  My dear sir:

  It has come to my attention that at the end of the enterprise in which my colleagues and I are presently engaged, some of us—that is to say all of us who will remain alive, by your good graces—will be in desperate need of asylum. It is likely no secret to you that my colleagues are involved in all manner of activities of which you are not aware. That is to be expected. I mean to assist you with this problem. I agree, on my word as a Catholic, to provide you with information about these activities in exchange for a promise. You must promise that I, Professor Martin Victor, will be granted a position as a researcher for the Reich for the duration of the war. To be specific, my requests are twofold: that you will provide some means for me to leave Belgium after the completion of this project (including swift transportation and personnel to carry my possessions across the border), and that you will provide some means for me to remain employed with a decent living while the war continues. I realize you have no reason to believe that I am being truthful. But you seem as though you are a good judge of character.

  I remain, sir, your servant,

  Prof. Martin Victor

  Since the beginning of the war, the Gestapo had been aware of Victor’s exploits; it was said that top-ranking officials, on their first day of work, received a copy of Mein Kampf, instructions on budget-making, and Professor Martin Victor’s file. His record was extraordinary. It seemed implausible that a man of his loyalty and reputation would offer himself to the Nazis. But rumors began to spread, tales of Victor’s illness. War did odd things to the best of men. Wolff had seen it before: giants turned small, men reduced to shivering children.

  Wolff fed a sheet of paper to his typewriter. Professor Victor, he typed. I have read your letter with great interest. A corner of Victor’s paper had begun to curl, as though the words were recoiling from each other—desperate need of asylum and occupation—whimpering words for the man who once ventured to Auschwitz not with a rifle or a tank but with a notebook. If the war could cripple a man such as this—if the war could turn Professor Victor, Wolff could hardly hope to make it out alive. I accept your proposal, he typed.

  The Professor

  Victor paused at a street corner to gather himself. He felt the need to do that more frequently these days, like there were fragments of him scattered everywhere and he was constantly searching for a mislaid piece. Wolff would accept his proposal, Victor knew. The man was, of course, obsessed with information; he would not refuse the promise of intelligence. But if the FI got word that there was a leak inside the base, Aubrion might suspect Victor, and all would be lost. At university, many of Victor’s colleagues believed that a man could not be both pious and cunning, but Victor had crossed himself and outwitted them all. Here, too, he would do the same. Though the guilt of it pained him, the logical move—the cunning move—was to divert the others’ attention. The professor would make them believe that someone else had leaked information to August Wolff. And the victim was obvious. Victor pulled his hat over his eyes, as though to shield his face from God. But there was no need, was there? God kept men like Victor in His hands, and He had no love for men like David Spiegelman.

  10 DAYS TO PRINT

  LATE MORNING

  The Pyromaniac

  A FIRE STARTED that morning in a barn just outside town. The local paper would report that a stable-boy kicked over a lantern near a pile of hay. Though no one in town knew what had actually started it, the Germans didn’t want anyone to believe they were responsible, and so they waved it all away with a harmless tale. I watched the smoke from a thousand meters off, counting the plumes as they hitched a ride on the wind.

  I do not spend too much time these days thinking about my motivations for starting fires. “Motivations lead too easily to justifications.” That is what Aubrion taught me. Because I was a child at the time of Faux Soir, a time when I was setting one or two fires a month, the motivations and justifications come too easily to me: I did not know any better; I made sure no one was hurt; I craved emotional release—and so on. But to allow myself to accept these justifications as truth is to absolve myself of my transgressions. I did know better; a child of ten or twelve years, while not emotionally complex, is not emotionally dumb, either. I did not make sure no one was hurt, for I destroyed property and livelihoods. I did not crave emotional release; the FI gave me a family, and a home, and a safe place to hide that which frightened me.

  I
bring this up because the fire, the one I started in a barn north of Enghien, shook me. At the time, I did not know why. I’d started many fires by then, and this one was no different from the others. But I felt hollow, used-up.

  When I was small, I used to go wandering in the field near my parents’ house, picking up bits of treasure that I’d bring to my father for inspection.

  “What’s this? What about that one?”

  “That is a bullet, from a battle that happened here many years ago during the Great War.”

  “A bullet from a gun?”

  “A rifle, and an evil one, at that. Do you see how the middle of the bullet has been hollowed out? It is lighter than a normal bullet, but so much more terrible.”

  Perhaps the fire shook me because I remembered that bullet, and I remembered what I did with it after my father explained what it was: I cast it into a river, where no one could find it.

  * * *

  Shortly after I returned to my newsstand, a courier delivered a message to me. He was one of the scabby-kneed lads who’d gone to work for the FI after he lost his parents, who probably ran notes for the Germans too on his off-days. “It’s from Madame Tarcovich,” he said, and I gave him a coin to get rid of the nosey lout. I unrolled the little slip of paper, which informed me: We’re going to see Pauline.

  Only thrice in my time with the FI did I receive such a note. The first note took me to a farmhouse, where the farmer’s wife had hidden a crate of Austrian hammers and nails (precious commodities in those days, when everything was so tightly regulated); Tarcovich and I loaded the crate into a rusty Nash-Kelvinator and smuggled it to a resistance base. The second note took me to a warehouse packed to the roof with banned novels, some of which I loaded into a cart that Tarcovich and I drove to a safe house. And so, this third message inspired a thrill of anticipation and fear that chased me down the street, where I met Tarcovich in front of an abandoned cobbler shop. There, she repeated her message. “We’re going to see Pauline.”

  I have forgotten Pauline’s last name. I am not sure whether I knew it in the first place. Though Pauline served as Tarcovich’s accomplice on countless smuggling jobs, I only ever met her those three times, when Tarcovich needed me to play-act as her child. “The patrols are less likely to look twice at a mother with a child,” Tarcovich explained. “Besides, you’ll calm poor Pauline’s heart. She’s such a nervous thing.” While we walked to the post office, Tarcovich told me Pauline’s story.

  Pauline is a minor figure in the tale of Faux Soir, which is exactly why I wish to spend a moment with her. On Pauline’s seventh birthday, her mother promised the girl she’d grow up to do tremendous things in this world. With a shudder, Pauline replied: “God, I hope not.” When rumors of invasion flooded our town with the first spring rain, she took a job at the postal service outpost in Enghien. If the Germans did march into Belgium, Pauline wanted them to find her behind a dull, harmless, and thoroughly nonpartisan desk. After the Nazis invaded, they did indeed allow Pauline to keep her appointment at the post office.

  A year into the occupation, Tarcovich received a telex at the whorehouse. She never found out how the woman on the other end—halting voice, broken sobs—discovered Lada’s identity or how to contact her. The woman introduced herself as Pauline and begged Tarcovich to come quickly. Tarcovich put on a respectable dress, tucked a pistol into her purse, and walked to the postal service outpost.

  When she arrived, a thin woman with a vulture neck and dowdy brown hair led her to the mailroom. There, bolts of yellow cloth lay stacked up to the ceiling, like the body bags that littered the towns near the front. Tarcovich snorted. “Is this a joke,” she’d said, “or are you mad?” Wordless, Pauline unrolled one of the bolts to spread it across the floor.

  The cloth was about the size of a large blanket, perhaps four meters by two meters. Someone had sewn—with a sewing machine, judging by the look of the stitches, and here Tarcovich stopped breathing—someone had sewn yellow Stars of David into the fabric. It must have been an industrial sewing machine, operated by a factory worker with a keen eye, for the stiches were clean and precise. Each star was labeled JUDE. Tarcovich felt her knees buckle. It was the math, the math that did her in: There must have been ten dozen bolts of fabric, and there were twelve post offices in Enghien, and there were five hundred and eighty-nine municipalities in Belgium, and Belgium was one country, one out of many. The stars were perforated, ready to be cut out. Pauline pointed at a box stamped with the German eagle and swastika. Tarcovich looked inside. Scissors grinned at her from under a modest layer of cloth. “That was it,” said Tarcovich. “It was the scissors that did it.” That was when she knew this was going to be a long war.

  Pauline wept softly. “I sorted their mail, their orders.” The woman was as young as Tarcovich, not very old at all, but she looked much older, matronly even, with ugly chipped nails that she’d chewed raw. “I knew what the letters must have said. They had that horrid...thing on them, the swastika. But I didn’t open them. I never read them. It was out of my hands if I never read them, wasn’t it? But this.”

  “I will take them,” said Tarcovich.

  She left just long enough to borrow a van; one of Lada’s girls had a brother who worked as a trash collector and who was off duty that day. After loading the cloth into the van, Tarcovich drove shaky and breathless to the whorehouse. Numb with terror, she brought the fabric up to her attic, one painful bolt at a time, certain she would be caught, that she’d feel the eye of a gun against her throat. Still trembling, Tarcovich sent Marc Aubrion a telex.

  When he arrived, Aubrion laughed at the stacks of fabric. “I know things are bad, Lada, but you’re not about to take up quilting, are you?”

  Tarcovich unrolled a bolt of fabric. The life drained from Aubrion’s face. She watched him perform the same calculations she had done at the postal office: adding it all up, multiplying the figures. This was not just murder. Murder would have been painless. This was premeditated, industrialized, mass produced. This fabric came from an assembly line.

  “I couldn’t just leave it there.” Tarcovich sank onto her bed, her shoulders heaving—but no tears, no strength for tears. “The poor woman at the post office was in a state.”

  Aubrion said, “Yes, you bloody well could have just left it there.”

  “There’s no telling what she would have done with it.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I told her I have a plan.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  Pacing, Aubrion studied the yellow cloth. “Shit, Lada.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “This is—”

  “It is.”

  “But do you know how bad this is?”

  “Oh, I know exactly how bad this is,” said Tarcovich, for the Stars of David posed a unique challenge. She’d smuggled all manner of things before: books, eyeglasses, building supplies, sanitary belts, even parmesan and mozzarella, things she’d taken out of the city in carts, or into the city in motorcars, sometimes both in one day. But she could not simply take the fabric out of the city, where it would be put to the same purpose elsewhere. Even smuggling it out of the country would not help. The fabric had to be hidden or destroyed.

  “Did they send scissors too?” asked Aubrion.

  “Yes.”

  “Those bastards.”

  “That’s too kind.”

  “I don’t suppose we could just—I don’t know, really—cut up the fabric and leave it somewhere?”

  “They’ll find out,” said Tarcovich, and Aubrion knew it to be true.

  “Well, don’t expect me to help you with this.” Aubrion backed away from the fabric as though he might catch some terrible illness from it. “This is your mess, pal. I’m just an innocent bystander.”

  “Is that so? And how many of your ‘messes’ has t
his innocent bystander been forced to clean up?”

  Aubrion relented, as she’d known he would. Tarcovich told me they talked and quarreled and planned all night, until the two of them fell asleep in a pile of Nazi ingenuity.

  It was just after dawn when Tarcovich awoke. Some noise from downstairs had disturbed her. She stretched, working out a knot in her back. But then—Tarcovich cast off the muddle of sleep, nearly stepping on poor Aubrion. Ignoring his questions, she ran out into the church bells and spring rain, alive with a marvelous, stupid idea.

  I clung fast to her words as she relayed this tall tale. When we neared the post office, I said, “Please, madame, but what did you do?”

  “Have you ever attended a church service around here?” said Tarcovich, her smile enchanted by what I did not know.

  “A service? No, madame,” I said, puzzled. “I’m not one for church, really.”