The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “Could I trouble you for a glass of water, Gruppenführer?” Victor’s eyes wandered to Wolff’s naked bookshelves, decanters, framed certificates.

  Wolff poured him a glass. “You look pale.”

  Victor drained the glass, then set it on the table a tad too roughly. “I am feeling poorly.”

  “Please, take your time.” Wolff had heard tales of how this disease manifested, how the voices outside an office might churn and turn from laughter to cries, murmured chatter to screams.

  Victor took a moment to gather himself. “As I was saying... Was I saying something? Yes, David Spiegelman has tried to throw in his lot with Aubrion.”

  “I see,” said Wolff, keeping every muscle in his body still. “What has he done for you?”

  “Not a great deal.” Martin Victor massaged the bridge of his nose. The angle of his shoulders spoke eloquently of his pain. Though Wolff himself had never toured Auschwitz, he felt as though he were seeing a list of German atrocities written on Victor’s skin. They were not atrocities, of course, but necessities. Wolff would repeat it and make it so. “My interactions with him have been limited, but here’s my understanding of the situation. Once he learned Theo Mullier had been captured, he grew concerned for his own safety. He offered to help break Mullier out of Fort Breendonk.”

  “I fail to see how that makes any sense at all,” said Wolff.

  “All I can do is report what I’ve seen.”

  A wave of something like hope churned Wolff’s stomach. “So it would be safe to say that David Spiegelman’s loyalty still lies with the Reich?”

  Victor took off his spectacles to wipe them on his shirt. “My belief has always been that David Spiegelman’s loyalty lies with himself. That is all I am prepared to say about that.”

  Wolff fiddled with a pen to keep his hands busy. Idle hands build weapons for the enemy, his instructors had said. Idle hands, sinful heart, his mother had said. But that had been before the war, before Auschwitz, when men like Victor would live a lifetime without seeing a corpse. What had he done for fun as a young man? How had he kept himself occupied? Did he go for walks back then? Did he ever stop for a drink at a pub? It frightened him, how little he could remember. It was as though his life were split into two volumes, the first of which was kept locked away in a cabinet he could not reach.

  “Thank you for telling me this,” said Wolff. “Forgive me for asking, but—”

  “Where does my loyalty lie?” Victor smiled thinly.

  “Well, yes. To be blunt.”

  “It lies with my work, Gruppenführer. We have that in common, you and I.”

  The Jester

  Aubrion cornered David Spiegelman two blocks from the Nazi headquarters. “Spiegelman!” he called. “Wait, Spiegelman—David!”

  Spiegelman turned listlessly. “Hello, Monsieur Aubrion,” he said, his hands loose in his pockets.

  “You look like shit.”

  “You do not look much better.”

  Aubrion clapped Spiegelman on the shoulder, steering him toward an alley and away from Nazi ears. “Listen. I know neither of us do very well with this sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Monsieur Aubrion—”

  “Please call me Marc. My father, devil take him, was Monsieur Aubrion.”

  The two stopped in an alley. Aubrion shivered. He was not wearing a coat, and he kept his sleeves rolled up. The cold felt like someone’s nails raking lines across his bare arms.

  Spiegelman seemed unaffected by the cold. He said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Aubrion, who once halted an FI sting operation to buy a toy train for a boy in the streets, waved his hand in what he believed to be the direction of Fort Breendonk. “Losing,” he said. A breeze folded the wintery air around them, carrying with it the smell of fresh cold. It might snow soon, Aubrion realized. He adored the snow. Snow was the color of clean paper.

  “We have not quite lost the war yet, have we?” said Spiegelman.

  “Not losing versus winning.” Aubrion became very agitated. “You see, this is precisely why homonyms are so very dangerous. If I could obliterate them all, I would.”

  “Not losing versus winning?” Spiegelman prompted, gently.

  “No! Losing, as in—” Aubrion could not draw the word through his lips. So, he repeated: “Loss.”

  “I see your meaning,” said Spiegelman. “Monsieur Aubrion—”

  “Marc.”

  “Marc, I appreciate what you have to say.” Spiegelman turned his head to the sky. It was gray-green, the color of the Schutzstaffel uniform, and Spiegelman’s eyes glistened. “I did not know him. Mullier, I mean. But I am grieving him, as you are. More than that, I suppose—I am grieving the loss of Faux Soir. The loss of something I will never see to the end.” He looked down, embarrassed. “I don’t know. Perhaps this is foolishness. I’m sorry.”

  Aubrion picked his mind’s pockets for the right words. He found them, bent and crumpled, in a corner he never visited. “How would you like to do something really and truly crazy?”

  Chuckling, Spiegelman wiped his eyes with his fists. “Are you not doing that already?”

  “No, but us.”

  Spiegelman looked at him. “What about Noël?”

  “I will take care of René. I must warn you, though, it is truly crazy.”

  “The zwanze sort of crazy?”

  Aubrion grinned. “Far beyond zwanze, but just as beautiful. Something that will probably never work, and that would make René put me in a straitjacket if he learned of it.”

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “Christ, no. Walk with me. Does Wolff permit it?”

  “Permit me to leave the base? He knows I have nowhere to run.”

  “Excellent.” Aubrion set off; he heard Spiegelman hurry to keep up with his long, frantic strides. “We need to make sure the vans that carry Le Soir each day never make it to their destination on the eleventh.”

  “I thought Gamin was taking care of that.”

  “We should have another plan ready, in case he fails.”

  “Which is where I come in?”

  “Which is where you come in.” Aubrion smiled at the eagerness in Spiegelman’s voice. He needed this as much as Aubrion did, that was obvious. He hungered after it, too. “What is the greatest distraction you can think of?”

  Spiegelman laughed bitterly. “Aside from the one that would land me in prison?”

  “No, no, think bigger. What would cause the greatest possible disruption to this?” Aubrion gestured at downtown Enghien: the children, the shopkeepers wary and eager with their sparse goods, the beggars, the Nazi patrols, the buildings with their weathered bodies. “To all of this?”

  “It would have to be catastrophic. Like a volcano.”

  “Name something more plausible.”

  “I don’t know. An air raid, I suppose.”

  Aubrion’s eyes glowed with unspeakable colors.

  5 DAYS TO PRINT

  LATE AFTERNOON

  The Pyromaniac

  I USED TO love playing near construction sites as a child, smelling the reek of tar and dodging falling planks and the shouts of workmen. As the Nazis moved through Europe, these workmen disappeared; it is difficult, I suppose, to build something out of rubble and used mortar shells. So, when I needed access to a construction site for my plan—what better place to find pipes and charcoal for constructing bombs?—I turned to the only resource I had: the businessman Ferdinand Wellens. I cornered him in one of our printing rooms.

  “What can I do for you, lad?” said Wellens. “Is something amiss?”

  “Not at all, monsieur. I was wondering...”

  “Yes, yes, wonder away!”

  “What sorts of businesses are you involv
ed in? I’d like nothing more, monsieur, than to be a businessman someday.”

  As I’d predicted, Wellens puffed out his chest. “I’m involved in just about everything you could name, boy—printing, meatpacking, automobile parts, oat harvesting—”

  “Construction?”

  Wellens thought about that. “Why, yes, now that you mention it, I do have a few construction sites. Obviously the war did a number on me in that area. Bad business, that. But yes, I do have a few sites left. There’s the site in Flanders, the site in Enghien—”

  “You have a site right here in Enghien, monsieur?”

  “Two kilometers north of here, in fact. I was contracted to build a church, I think.”

  After another hour of small talk, two workhouse boys and I set off to Ferdinand Wellens’s construction site.

  Wellens had vastly oversold it, I soon found. The “construction site” was really just a tar pit, the skeleton of a building, some half-empty cloth bags, and three metal beams left to freeze in the wind. When the boys and I got there, the workers were eating pastries. They threw their crumbs into a congress of malnourished pigeons.

  I motioned my lads behind a tree. “All right, now. Here’s what you’ll do. You two are going to find yourselves a bit of fun around here until the sun goes down.”

  Leon, a tiny afterthought of a boy with a knocked-out tooth and a hat he claimed to have stolen from some baron, said: “We have to stay here until after dark?”

  “That’s the deal.”

  “We’ll be whipped for sure when we get back,” said Nicolas, the other boy.

  “But there’s money in it, and it’s for Marc Aubrion.” I shoved Nicolas.

  “All right, all right. Christ, Gamin.”

  “Christ has got nothing to do with it,” I said, echoing what Aubrion always said. “So, when the sun goes down, you scurry right back here and lift two things. You hear me?”

  “We aren’t deafs, now, are we?” grumbled Leon.

  “You might as well be deafs. Two things.” I made sure to repeat myself, the way René Noël did. “One, you’ll grab at least a dozen metal pipes.”

  Leon was twisting his cap in his hands.

  I slapped at it. “Stop that.”

  He snatched it away. “Sorry, Gamin. I’m nervous, is all.”

  “Nothing to be nervous over. Nervous fingers is the only thing that should make you nervous here.” I cringed at my incorrect verb. It was easy to slip around these boys. “All right, two—you’ll grab a bag of charcoal. Hear me?”

  “Pipes and charcoal,” said Nicolas.

  “Anything else?” asked Leon.

  This seemed harmless enough, the business of stealing things. Neither Leon nor Nicolas—nor any of the other boys I knew—were strangers to theft. It was what we did, you understand. But I could not let them know how dangerous, how different, this operation was. We weren’t stealing bread or tankers of gin this time. We were stealing things the Nazis cared about, and there could be repercussions beyond anything these boys had ever known. I had been muttering to myself all morning, “I am a soldier of the FI,” but I had barely a glimmer of what that meant. I’d seen men at our base weeping on their knees. What could make a grown-up cry? I did not wish to know.

  “Don’t let them see you, hear me?” I said, because that was the most I could say.

  * * *

  My next task, as I mentioned, was to find a grandmother. I sat on a bench, waiting. A potential target lined up to buy bread at a stall on the Rue de Grady. Though I had only faint memories of my own grandmother, this woman reminded me of her.

  “Please, madame,” I said to her. The woman had wrapped herself in blankets and scarves. Only her eyes were visible. “I am so cold. Do you have any matches?”

  She ignored me. The bread line was hardly moving; she took half a step forward, following the trail of hungry hands and tired eyes that led to the baker’s stall. Men in dark uniforms paced around the line. Fights often broke out when the bakers ran out of bread, and the guns were around to keep those fights from turning into riots. I stayed sharp, ready to dart if the soldiers noticed me.

  I tried a different tack. “Please, madame. My grandmother was so gentle, like you.”

  That did not work, either. As a matter of fact, she seemed to resent the comparison. With an indignant sniff, she took another step forward in line. I tried once more.

  “The other woman I tried, she did not give me any matches. But I knew, madame, as soon as I saw your face, that you were far too kind to leave my sister and me in the cold.”

  The change was immediate. “Oh, you poor boy.” Hand on her chest, the woman bent to touch my cheeks and forehead. “People don’t want to be heroes, Gamin,” was what Aubrion always said. “They just want to be a bigger hero than their neighbor.” My bigger hero patted at her dress. “Your cheeks are ice, you poor boy.” She stuffed a matchbook into my hand. “Take this and warm yourself. Do you need money for bread?”

  I said I did not, and went about my business. My business, in this case, involved finding another old woman at the other side of town. Bright patches dotted her clothes; that is all I can remember of her. She stood outside a butcher shop, squinting against the wind.

  “Madame.” I kept my head down, my eyes down. “Please, madame, I am so cold—”

  My pockets were soon weighed down by matchbooks, wrapped in scraps of cloth to keep them dry. This was, you must realize, a problem. I was as an opium addict with vials of powder, a drunk with bottles rattling around in a cart. As I walked on, I ached to stop and strike a match—not only because it was cold, which it was, but because I longed to see the flame, to brush my fingers across the strands of red.

  “Good madame, sweet madame,” I pled. The woman was peering through the boarded-up windows of a trinket shop. “Please help me and my—”

  As the woman turned, I realized my mistake. The good madame, sweet madame was, in fact, the first grandmother I’d spoken to that day.

  “What game are you playing at, boy?” she said. I was about to jog off, thinking she’d leave me alone—but I had not yet learned that our fear of tyranny makes us loyal to it. “Police!” the woman called. “Police, he is a pickpocket!”

  There were no police any longer: only Germans, who came after me with their rifles. “Dieser Junge! That boy!” the Nazis said. They were not firing, not yet, but they were running in my direction, so I took off down the street, the matchbooks in my pockets slapping my thighs.

  I turned a corner, weaving through carts and horses and shopkeepers and children. The buildings in Anderlecht have not changed in seventy years; they are lean and narrow now, as they were then. They cast a slender, blue shadow on me and the Nazis and the ice-slicked street. The Germans wore fine black boots that made music as they gave chase, while I wore a pair of shoes I took off a dead refugee, two sizes too large, and full of holes. I slipped as I ran; the Germans did not—and every time I slipped, my pursuers grew closer.

  After a few minutes, the cold air started to burn my chest, and my head swam. I had not eaten much that day, I’d not had much water, and I was still on my period. I came across a building of brick and stone, broader and pointier than the others. With a tense glance behind me, I began to climb the building. I heard the Nazis engage in a few seconds of discussion—“Sollten wir? Ja?”—before a couple tried to follow me up. But, just as I had calculated, their equipment was too heavy, their clothing too much. They were no match for the agility of the half-starved.

  I crouched atop the building, my arms shaking. Pieces of conversation, chopped up by the wind, came to me; the Germans considered finding another way to the roof, but I wasn’t worth the effort. When the Nazis departed, and were unlikely to return, I stuck my shivering body over the side of the building and climbed down. I paused halfway to the bottom, concerned my descent might cause someone to raise the alarm.
Nothing. I suppose the people of the city had seen odder things than a boy sliding down a drainpipe.

  It was too soon to return to the center of town, but too cold to remain outside. And so I began to walk, feeling rather purposeless. In doing so, I happened upon a building, even slenderer than its neighbors, with two powder-blue doors and a boarded-up gate. I stood on tiptoe to peer between the boards. Though I could not tell what the building had been before, it was clearly abandoned now. Taking care that no one saw me, I squeezed through the boards and into the inky unknown. I paused to listen for footsteps outside. I heard none.

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  THE OLD WOMAN watched Eliza smile, an expression that came so easily to those who knew Marc Aubrion. It wasn’t an ordinary smile, but rather a slow appreciation for something she could not quite comprehend. “A building with blue doors?” said Eliza. “Is it this building? The one we’re sitting in?”

  Helene leaned back in her chair. “It might be.”

  “Might be?”

  “The mind of an old woman is a fickle thing. I may have forgotten the particulars.”

  “Helene.” Eliza laughed, realizing the old woman was toying with her. The table separating them seemed to disappear, like there was no distance between them at all, like they were one body and one person. Helene felt a warmth for Eliza she’d hitherto reserved for Aubrion. She was passing the girl something delicate, piece by piece. Eliza held out her careful, willing palms, ready to build anew.

  5 DAYS TO PRINT

  LATE AFTERNOON

  The Pyromaniac

  I EXPECTED, through the years, that the terrible things I saw and did would stay with me—and they did. But even as other memories died, one parasite remained, swollen and vulgar, inside my body. It started in that abandoned building—this building—the one with two blue doors.

  The room had been painted in faces and eyes. They were everywhere, those faces, and I can see them now, just as I saw them then: hundreds of faces papering the walls, carpeting the floor, draped across tables and desks, sticking to my shoes. I lunged for the door. In doing so, I dropped my match, which expelled an irritated puff of smoke and went out.