The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  David Spiegelman would send the letters, and his words would run free from this place.

  3 DAYS TO PRINT

  AFTERNOON

  The Jester

  HEARING A CLAMOR on the floor above, Aubrion glanced up from his pad of paper; he’d habitually tear off corners of his paper as he worked, so the pad was frayed at the edges, Aubrion’s desk littered in flecks of white. Red-faced and huffing, Noël came downstairs. He was holding something, maybe an envelope, and a photograph, too. Noël did not notice Aubrion. The photograph seemed to demand everything of him: his posture and attention served only the cheap blotting paper.

  Aubrion knew, intellectually, that he should excuse himself and permit Noël some privacy. Of course, he did not.

  “René?” said Aubrion, startling the director.

  Noël clutched his chest. “Marc. You’ve been sitting there.”

  “How charitable of you to notice.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This? Nothing important.” Awash in his lie, Noël held the photograph and looked at it. The director usually moved with such strict economy, conserving his energy for where it was most needed. But he was chaotic now, all limbs and heavy breathing. Aubrion feared he might burst a blood vessel. “Do you remember Margaux?”

  “Your wife?”

  “You met her a few years ago. Did I ever tell you how I convinced her to go to America?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She took the girls, you know. I asked her to. I knew they weren’t safe here.”

  Without waiting for Aubrion to answer, Noël walked over and handed him the photograph. Aubrion did indeed recognize Margaux: a plain woman, large-shouldered, with a patrician forehead and aristocratic nose, like someone had fashioned her out of two different characters. In the photo, Margaux’s hands were on two young girls’ shoulders—Noël’s daughters, Aubrion recalled. The girls had Margaux’s eyes and Noël’s smile.

  “Lara and Bette.” Noël tapped the photograph. His eyeglasses, which he wore more often these days, slipped to the tip of his nose. “Margaux sent this to me. She meant to shame me, I’m sure. Make me feel guilty for staying behind, insisting they go to America without me. I haven’t the slightest idea how she knew where to find me. But that was my Margaux. She works as a seamstress now, in a place called the Bronx.”

  Aubrion leaned over the photograph. He noticed a rip in the sleeve of Margaux’s dress, which she’d attempted to repair with coarse string and uneven stitching. If she was a seamstress, she was a poor one. It surprised Aubrion that she’d spend money on a photograph.

  But then it was clear to him that she had taken this photograph specifically for her husband, to taunt him and beg him and slap him all at once. Though her eyes had frozen over, she was still wearing her wedding band. And her daughters, those poor girls: they smiled to obey an order, and nothing more. An otherworldly fire spread through Aubrion’s gut. The poor girls had their father’s thin lips. They would look like him when they grew up; they would smile at their lovers and friends with Noël’s sardonic lips; they would frown in that uncompromising manner; they would grow up. They would speak a different language than their father. They probably did already. A muscle tightened in Noël’s jaw—and then he cried out their names, the names of his daughters. Aubrion looked away, frightened at the man’s tears.

  Noël could not speak, for a moment—could not move. Then he said, “I told her I was having an affair.”

  “What?” said Aubrion.

  “That’s how I convinced Margaux to leave. It’s the only way I could do it. I tried, but she wouldn’t leave.”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Having an affair.”

  “Marc, when the bloody hell have I had time to carry on an affair?” And then the photograph had fluttered to the floor, another snowflake to be trodden upon by pedestrians and German boots. Noël erased a chalkboard. “Where is Wellens?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I need to speak to Wellens,” Noël snapped. “We have things to do, matters to prepare. This is my duty, and I do not sit idle, do I? Have I ever?” The director ran a hand through his beard. He was staring at the broken printing press, Aubrion noted, as though it were the locus of all his troubles. He went quiet. “Please, Marc. Where is Wellens?”

  Aubrion put his hand on Noël’s shoulder. The director stiffened, but he did not move away. Marc Aubrion thought of Noël as the personification of the Front de l’Indépendance, and in many ways, he was. He was stoic, impenetrable, unflappable, a tad ridiculous. He wore that horrid uniform with the oversized trousers, by God, because it was proper. But Noël was a man, too, a man who loved dark beer, who was given to loud political discussions over strong liquor, who’d married young and had two girls and then given them up, trading them in for that wretched uniform. Aubrion saw in him a strength he’d never before noticed.

  “Wellens is at the factory, getting everything ready for tomorrow,” Aubrion said quietly.

  “And do we know,” asked Noël, “what became of Spiegelman?”

  “Spiegelman will not be coming back.” Victor descended the stairs to the basement, looking distracted. “I’ve been out gathering intelligence. Wolff has caught on to Spiegelman’s involvement and has banned him from leaving the Nazi headquarters.”

  Aubrion’s chest tightened. He and Noël fell quiet. Their eyes went to the stairs, as though they expected Spiegelman to come join them, laughing at their gullibility, at his finest prank. Of course, that did not happen.

  “Is there any way—” Aubrion began.

  “No, Marc.” Noël shook his head. “If we try to slip him a message, we will put him in even greater danger.”

  Aubrion could not argue. He felt suddenly off-balance, like those cases he’d heard about, the ones where people woke up feeling out of sorts and died of a heart attack before the day was out. Though it made little sense to him now, he’d expected to see Spiegelman once more before they printed Faux Soir, to celebrate with him properly. But it would not be. It was like he’d missed the end of a great play, one he’d never get the chance to see again.

  The Professor

  Martin Victor took his leave of the FI base and walked to his flat. There, he took a checklist from his pocket to tack it to the wall of his study. “Three sets of clothing,” he read, ticking things off on his fingers, “trunk, encyclopedias, coat and hat.” He was allowed to take as much as he could fit in a cart; that was what Wolff had said. The clothing was already folded and tucked into an attaché case. The trunk contained Victor’s most important books and papers, and he’d packed it days ago. All he needed was to rummage for his encyclopedias.

  He licked the tip of his pen, then crossed off three sets of clothing. Victor dropped the pen before he could do the same for trunk. His hands grew more unsteady each day, and he could no longer rely on them. Not for the first time that week, Victor contemplated taking a pistol to his head. If a man could not trust his own hands, what was left for him? The professor had betrayed his colleagues, himself, even August Wolff—but to take his own life would be to betray his work, his faith, his wife’s memory. He did not know how to do such a thing.

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  HELENE BLEW ON her hands to warm them, though the room was no colder than it had been previously. “It was close to the end, you know,” she said. “I knew that, even then. It rained all night, and Marc Aubrion was writing. I cradled an empty mug, the cocoa gathering in clots at the bottom, watching him from my seat atop a printing press. Once every hour, he’d look up, confused, as though he could not figure out why he didn’t hear the scratch of his pen. Then his eyes would turn to the basement window. He’d give the rain a reproachful nod, continue with his work. This went on for ages.”

  The old woman paused. “
I could not explain how—and I still cannot—but I knew I would survive Faux Soir. It was not just the optimism of youth, or the ignorance of someone who hadn’t seen death. It was a good deal more than that. This was a war for great men, and I was too small. Aubrion, in my eyes, was the greatest.”

  2 DAYS TO PRINT

  MORNING

  The Dybbuk

  NOVEMBER 9, —43, WOLFF TYPED. Conducted raid of bookshop, The Spool, in eastern Brussels. Purged nearly two hundred pieces of objectionable and pornographic material. Two executions. Nine arrests. David Spiegelman remains under temporary confinement. La Libre Belgique is on schedule.

  The Jester

  The rain decided it’d had enough of Enghien, startling Aubrion into wakefulness. He stretched, working the knots out of his legs on the way to the washroom. As he stooped to wash his face, Aubrion blinked at his reflection in the cracked mirror. With his manic curls and wide, dark-rimmed eyes, he looked like a tragic character from a play he once saw, something about Greek gods. He’d walked out of the second act and made up a scathing review about the ending. Shivering, Aubrion pulled his sleeves over his hands and returned to the basement.

  Tarcovich had taken his place by the broken printing press, her hair wet from a bath or the rain. She’d draped her blue scarf around a simple tunic and trousers. Aubrion waved, and she handed him a mug of coffee.

  He wrinkled up his nose at it. “What’s this?”

  “Drink it,” said Tarcovich, her hands wrapped around a matching cup.

  “Are you poisoning me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Finally.” Aubrion drank. “Christ, that’s good. This isn’t German.”

  “I’d been saving up, since all this began—you know, since the war. Just in case. Waste not, want not, and all that.” Tarcovich sniffled, though her eyes were dry. “But this morning I looked out the window, and it was...” She waved at the ceiling, her eyes bright. “You saw it. I wondered what the devil I was saving all that money for. And so.” Shrugging, Tarcovich drank her coffee. “Only one coffeehouse in Enghien still makes coffee worth drinking.”

  “The Easterner?”

  “Easterner’s been closed for six months, Marc.”

  Aubrion set his coffee aside. “George’s place?”

  Tarcovich nodded.

  “Fuck,” said Aubrion.

  “I think he got out.”

  “He had three kids.”

  “Two kids. Two girls.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  Aubrion stared into his cup. “I got drunk with him the night the war came to Belgium.”

  “I remember. René spent all night trying to find you. He told me he’d never work with you again.” Tarcovich put down her mug, looking over Aubrion’s frayed pages of writing. “Are these them? Your obituaries?”

  As Aubrion started to respond, Noël and Victor came downstairs, talking in low tones. They stopped when they reached the bottom step.

  “Good morning, all,” said Noël. His beard was a tad overgrown, which made his eyes look unnaturally small. “We just received a telex from Monsieur Wellens. He’s nearly ready for us. We should lay everything out for printing.”

  “Anything from our pal Harris yet?” asked Aubrion.

  Noël shook his head. “Sorry, Marc.”

  “There is a problem,” said Victor. “We have several unprocessed photographs, and Wellens doesn’t have the equipment we need to deal with them.”

  “I knew he wouldn’t,” said Aubrion. “But Gamin does.”

  The Pyromaniac

  We piled into the Nash-Kelvinator, sitting on top of each other like used books at an estate sale. I sat in front so I could direct Noël to the blue-doored building.

  As he and I took care of the business of driving, Aubrion told everyone about old Dr. Borremans. “Born in Flanders in 1895, died in Brussels in 1943,” he read from his notepad, which was helpfully labeled Faux Soir Obituaries, “Dr. Miet Borremans was renowned in his community for popularizing the traditionally German idea of eugenics. This paper wishes to acknowledge that many of Dr. Borremans’s friends and patients were skeptical of the principle upon first learning of its importance to the Reich. Always a visionary, Dr. Borremans conducted a thorough study of the idea and published his findings in leading scientific journals. His fifteen-year marriage to Eugenia Claet of the Claet family, an old Belgian lineage with which our readers will undoubtedly be familiar, produced an accomplished daughter with a bad ear and a strapping young son with polio.”

  I laughed, as did everyone else. Noël almost missed a turn onto the main road. “Oh, no, make a left here, monsieur,” I directed.

  Grinning, Aubrion read from the second page of his torn-up pad of paper. “Born in Ghent in 1864, died in Enghien in 1943, Madame Edith Van den Berg was, in addition to a loving mother and wife, a noted patriot. She was often seen, as her neighbors will attest, participating in parades, rallies, and discussions on the politics and moral strength of Mother Belgium. Last year, at the age of seventy-eight, she organized a debate between a German political thinker named Gunter and a Belgian dissenter whose name shall not tarnish this reputable paper. Though she was born in Belgium and lived here all her life, and though the debate lasted a mere six minutes, Madame Van den Berg, a woman of conscience, did not hesitate to award a victory to the German.”

  Again, the car shook with our laughter. In truth, I understood only a fragment of the obituaries, and I could not have articulated why they were so funny. But it was good to hear the others laugh.

  “These are actually splendid, Marc,” said Noël.

  Aubrion shuffled the pages. “Could you make some effort to sound less surprised?”

  “I am never surprised at the quality of your work.”

  “Then what are you?”

  Tarcovich leaned over as though she were about to tell Aubrion a tremendous secret. “He is surprised,” she whispered.

  “How many of these obituaries did you write?” asked Victor.

  “Seven.” Aubrion thumbed through the paper. “No, eight.”

  “They are a bit...” Victor shrugged, pulling off his glasses with unsteady hands. “They are irreverent. I read a piece on satire by a fellow named Stevens, who argues that the meaning of a satirical piece should be buried beneath layers and layers of genuine comedy.”

  “Layers and layers,” repeated Aubrion, flatly.

  “It’s very transparent satire, is what I am saying. The satire leaves little to—”

  “Oh, shut up, Martin.”

  “The piece is funny,” said Tarcovich. “It’s zwanze. I vote to leave it in.”

  “Lada has spoken,” said Noël.

  We pulled up to the blue-doored building: an unassuming structure, three stories of disinterested lines and arches. Since Nicolas and I had sheltered there, someone had graffitied the words OUI, NON, and MÈRE on the wood, a Freudian couplet in moss-colored paint.

  “Park a block or two away,” said Victor.

  Noël did so. We got out and walked toward the building in pairs, for the whole group of us would have aroused suspicion. Victor accompanied Noël, Aubrion walked with Tarcovich, and I followed closely behind.

  “I do not know,” said Tarcovich, nodding at his rolled-up sleeves, “how you aren’t cold.”

  Aubrion looked up at the sky; it was ashen, like the face of a man who’d just been shot. “Is it cold out here?”

  Tarcovich ran her fingers across his arm, speckled with goose pimples. He shuddered at her touch. Aubrion could not recall the last time a woman had touched him, and though he thought of Tarcovich as a sister, her touch made him wonder at things that would not be—that couldn’t be, not anymore. Droplets of rain began to fall. Aubrion quickened his pace.

  “You could roll down your sleeves, you know,
” said Tarcovich. “Or wear a coat. Do you own a coat?”

  Aubrion said nothing. They walked on, for a time, and then he asked her: “Do you know the cemetery at the border of the city?”

  “The one where they bury the political prisoners? Of course. Young lovers go there after curfew all the time.” Tarcovich smiled. “You can hear them until well after dawn. The families who live in the tenements on Eighth—the parents tell their children it’s just the wind.”

  Aubrion tucked the fake obituaries under his arm. He was grasping, I think, for a feeling or something else. The Germans would not bury Theo Mullier in that cemetery, the one for political prisoners. More likely, he would be tossed in a pit outside Fort Breendonk—he already had been, to be sure. But the spirit of him was in that cemetery, pieces of who he was, things he did. The spirit of him was in this city, in Aubrion’s work, in everything. “These obituaries,” Aubrion said, still grasping, but he was out of time. “I was at it all night, you know. And all day.”

  “I know.” Tarcovich turned up her collar against the rain.

  They ducked into the blue-doored building and waited for the others to follow. A band of light, which had escaped through a hole in the blue door, illuminated Aubrion’s face. When everyone was inside, Aubrion threw a bundle of papers onto a table.

  “These,” he said, “are undeveloped photos for the paper, including the Hitler photographs Lada so kindly procured for us. From what Gamin tells us, there’s enough chemicals here to develop that lot.”

  “I can set to work on that,” said Victor. “I shall need to see what we have here.”

  As Victor proceeded, Aubrion righted a table and placed the Hitler photographs atop it.

  “I have an idea for what I want it to look like.” Aubrion slapped one of the photographs. In it, Hitler stood with his arms outstretched, his mouth wide. Though the exposure was terrible, and you could only see half of his face, the likeness was unmistakable. “I want this one on the bottom left-hand corner, framed with three lines of text. Something about how our pal the Führer meant to deliver a speech in Berlin, something about patriotism and the progress of the war—only he got his papers mixed up, you see. He had a copy of a speech Churchill gave last week, and he delivered that instead.”