“The Royal Air Force.”
“And you will be arrested?” The way Andree asked the question—it was as though she was a child who’d just learned the word arrested. Tarcovich put her hand on Andree’s knee, hoping she would not flinch. Andree did not. Perhaps she forgave Lada her sins, but perhaps she was only in shock.
“I don’t know that for certain,” said Tarcovich. “But we are printing the paper today and distributing it tomorrow, at four in the afternoon. The Gestapo is full to bursting with mindless arseholes, but even so, it should not take them long to figure out what is amiss.” Lada took a breath. “Now that you know everything, I am going to plead with you again for the lives of my girls.”
“Lada, no. I cannot.”
“You cannot what?” It came out sharper than Lada intended. But she was furious at Andree for interrupting her when it had taken her so long and so much to say it. “You cannot listen to me?”
“I cannot do anything for them—for anyone.” Andree stood, turning away from Lada, her posture hunched and impenetrable. “I cannot be seen with you any longer. I do not know what you want from me, or what you want me to do, what you think I can do. Whatever it is, I don’t have it—I cannot do it.”
Lada held out a hand. She did not frighten easily—she rarely panicked—and yet her heart pounded in her temples. Something was veering off course, but if Andree took her hand, the ship would right itself. Every muscle of Lada’s body pled with her. “Andree, you can. Listen to me. Let Lotte and Clara go free, and then run—”
“Run where?”
“You can’t stay here.”
“This happened because of you.” Grandjean’s hands went to her chest. And there it was, exactly what Lada had feared. The cold shock of the thing had gone, and in its place, an impenetrable anger had filled Grandjean’s body. “You made me.”
“Made you what?”
“Fall in love with you.” Andree’s face was hideous with tears. “You have known for weeks that tomorrow would come, and yet you did this anyway. You were all that mattered. I was nothing.”
The weight of those words, fall in love, landed heavily between Lada’s shoulder blades. It was true, it was not something Lada had made up. But the words were curdling in Andree’s heart as Lada watched.
Grandjean held Lada’s notebook out to her. “Leave me alone.”
“Andree, please.” Lada moved to push the notebook away. If she touched it, though, Grandjean would make her leave. “I don’t know how to leave. I cannot live like this.”
“You should have thought about that at the very beginning.” Grandjean thrust the notebook into Lada’s hands. “Take it.”
Tarcovich tried to conjure a word or a feeling, but there was nothing left for her to say, nothing she could feel. She turned to go, dropping her notebook onto the pile of novels and tomes. It came to rest between Poems of Sappho and a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
LAST DAY TO PRINT
LATE AFTERNOON
The Jester
WELLENS WAS BOUNDING about the factory floor like a schoolboy after the bell, his blue cape struggling to catch up. “You must see this,” he kept saying. “You really must.” He led Aubrion and me and the others to the loading dock behind his factory. There, workmen were unloading a pair of vans, carting away sheets of paper and barrels of ink.
“That’s the lot of it?” Noël asked Victor.
The professor nodded. “That’s everything the Germans gave us for our school, plus everything we purchased with the forty-five thousand francs from the auction, plus the five thousand francs Wolff gave us at the start of it.”
Noël whistled. “Gentlemen, we have not done poorly for ourselves.”
Aubrion peered into the van, his eyes widening. It was endless, the paper (bundled up in stacks of a hundred, tied together with string) and ink (packed in cheap, black-stained barrels that made seasick noises when the workmen lifted them) stretching on past what he could see. He was drunk with the smell of it. We all were. The ink caressed the clean, woody paper, and it all mingled together in the wind until Aubrion had to close his eyes with the power of it.
“It is,” said Wellens, puffing out his chest, “more than enough for the fifty thousand copies we discussed, Monsieur Noël.”
“Yes.” Noël laughed, shaking his head like he’d just witnessed a miracle—which, of course, he had. “I suppose it is. Where the devil is Lada? She should be here for this.”
Aubrion cleared his throat. “I think she went to see Grandjean.”
“Oh.” Noël’s expression could not quite make up its mind: hope, judgment, resignation. “Well, God save them.”
Victor said, “Have your linotypists prepared the machines, Monsieur Wellens?”
“Hang on,” said Aubrion. “Linotypists? Surely you have letter-pressing machines.”
“Naturally.” Wellens nodded at his factory floor.
“Then why aren’t we using them?”
“It does not make sense financially,” said Noël. “Letter-pressing would cost us around ten francs a paper.”
“And so?” asked Aubrion.
“Linotyping, the modern way,” replied Victor, “would cost around one franc per paper.”
“I know how much these things cost.”
“In that case,” said Victor, “I do not understand the problem.”
“The problem is that we have spent the past three weeks killing ourselves, sometimes literally, to create this paper.” The workers started to look in Aubrion’s direction. Noël motioned for him to lower his voice. “I know, René, but surely you aren’t going to stand for this, are you? You have seen what linotype machines can do to a paper. It is rape, I say. Crooked text, fuzzy photographs—”
“Monsieur,” Wellens said through his mustache, “my men are among the best in Europe.”
Aubrion was insistent. “It does not matter how good they are. Don’t you see? The equipment, Wellens. The problem is with the equipment.”
“Shall we discuss this inside?” sighed Noël, so we filed into Wellens’s office, shutting the door behind us. I sat on Wellens’s desk. “Marc, listen. I understand where you are coming from. It is a matter of respect for our labors.” The small room cramped the director’s voice. “But, listen—if we use the cheaper material, we can print more papers. Surely that’s more important than the quality of the stuff we’ve used to print it.”
“Fifty thousand copies,” said Aubrion, flatly.
“That’s right. Fifty thousand people laughing at the Fuhrer...and more, really. They will give it to their families in the country, their friends in Flanders.”
“Fifty thousand copies on bad paper, as opposed to what?” Aubrion calculated. “Five thousand copies on good paper?”
“That is accurate,” said Victor.
“Quality is what matters here, don’t you see?” said Aubrion, growing animated. “More than five thousand would be wonderful, of course, and I’ve dreamed about it, but—Christ, there is no way in heaven or hell we would be able to distribute fifty thousand fake newspapers before some chap at the Gestapo says, ‘Gee, Hans, I wonder what those are.’”
“What has gotten into you?” said Noël, echoing my thoughts, for it alarmed me to see Aubrion this way. On Marc Aubrion, practicality was an ill-fitting suit.
He averted his eyes, and though I was not privy to Aubrion’s feelings, I could see traces of them written in his hands and posture. He was thinking of Theo, I’ve no doubt. He could not decide whether Theo would’ve encouraged us to pull back, or to do as much as we could; he could not decide whether he would have listened. It hurt Aubrion, the callousness of not knowing.
“We have to do what is within our reach,” Aubrion decided.
“But what if we can get fifty thousand copies out on the streets before the Germans find out?” said Noël. “We have
our distribution system figured out, we have a distraction—”
“If we can, they are never going to last, to survive time. Even if people have them, the bloody cheap papers won’t last longer than a year. The text will fade. People will pass on the ghost of our work to their children.”
“Lord in Heaven,” said Victor. “People are not going to be passing this joke on to their children. It is a good thing we are doing, an important thing, but for God’s sake, Aubrion, be realistic. It only needs to last a day.”
“A day for these people, yes, but also a day for their children.”
Noël stepped between the two men. “The papers will last,” he said quietly, “if people want them to last. Think of the knygnešiai, Marc.”
“The book smugglers?”
“Weren’t you going to write a play about them?” Noël looked faintly disgusted with himself for remembering.
“I was.” Aubrion pushed up his sleeves. “I’m surprised you recall.”
“Think of it, Marc. The stuff they brought into Lithuania in the 1870s, the pamphlets and books they printed to defy the Russians—none of it should have lasted. But it did, and it has, and their language survived, their way of living survived. If people want Faux Soir to last, it will last. If they do not—” Noël smiled. “We have done our job. The rest is out of our hands.”
Aubrion thought for a moment. “Fine.”
“Fine?” said Noël.
“Yes, fine. Have your linotypists prepare the machines, Monsieur Wellens?”
I have never smiled as broadly or openly as Ferdinand Wellens did on this day. “They have, Monsieur Aubrion,” he said.
* * *
At first the typesetters made an error, and in their haste to correct it, jammed one of the linotype machines. Wellens’s factory was immense, and at the echoing thunder of the machinery, we ducked, convinced it was to end there. But there was no German rifle at our neck, no polished boots on the factory floor. It was, as I said, simply an error. A few turns of a wrench, a tightened bolt, and we set to work again.
Aubrion walked over to the linotypists’ seats, standing nearly on top of them as they labored. They kept looking up at him with sweat and grimaces on their faces, but my dear friend Aubrion did not notice, or chose not to.
“For God’s sake, Marc,” said Noël, after this had grown intolerable, “give them some room to breathe!”
So Aubrion gave them some room to breathe: half a meter, at his most generous. There were two of them working their bleeding hands and chipped fingernails. I read their names in Le Soir after they were caught: Pierre Ballancourt, the fellow on Aubrion’s left, had worked closely with Noël for years, and Julien Oorlinckx, the one on his right, was a typesetter renowned for his calligraphy. Even though they moved quickly—they were, as I said, the best of their age—we felt caged and impatient. Noël and Wellens paced; Tarcovich, who had finally joined us, balled up some scrap paper and tossed it against a wall; I drew shapes on the dust on a window; Victor rolled an empty flask back and forth between his hands; Aubrion had to take a walk, lest he combust.
I recall, from that time, that four roads converged in the parking lot of Wellens’s factory; Aubrion picked the gentlest and followed it through downtown Enghien. I tailed him from a distance, my desire to be close to him warring with his obvious need for privacy. Though the trappings of the city—the Nazi patrols, the shivering children—had not changed since the day before, or the year before, Aubrion walked lightly. I noticed early in the occupation that people walk differently when they are free, and Aubrion walked this way, without care for how loud his boots fell or whether he drew attention to himself. He walked as I did before the war, when I had candy in my pockets and knew nothing.
He stopped near the cemetery at the edge of town, the one in which he’d spoken to David Spiegelman ages before. After a moment’s hesitation, he walked among the headstones, holding out his arms as though he were balancing on a tightrope. Aubrion’s boots kicked clouds of dirt into the evening. There was a photographic quality to the place—a persistent stillness, a musty, old-book smell on the cool air—that made my scalp tingle. Aubrion did not remember a time when the cemetery didn’t frighten him. “Death is for the dead,” he used to say. Though we all mocked him for it, I later grew to understand the sentiment. To think about death was to admit defeat; that was how Aubrion felt. He avoided funerals and wakes, believing that if he shunned the company of death, it might return the favor. And if I’d asked how he felt the day we printed Faux Soir, when he was standing on tiptoe between the headstones of E. E. Berger and Tessa van Houst, he would have insisted nothing had changed, everything was the same. But Aubrion was a liar, bless him.
When he came to the northernmost edge, Aubrion turned to retrace his steps. As I’ve mentioned before, my dear Aubrion was not given to sentimentality, and while that was usually true, he broke with tradition that day. Aubrion was thinking, I learned later, of the war’s start. He was sitting at a coffeehouse in Flanders when he learned about the new resistance paper, La Libre Belgique, worrying over a play he was writing with sixteen possible titles and no first line. Aubrion hadn’t the money to buy coffee, but the barman played cards with him, so he let him stay. The FI’s new press director, one René Noël, had sent letters to potential contributors for the paper. Though Aubrion had received no such letter, he wasn’t about to let a technicality ruin his chances. He showed up to the writers’ inaugural meeting with outlines and scribbles and drafts. “René wanted nothing to do with me,” Aubrion was fond of saying. It was true. Noël agreed to let the wide-eyed, untidy man contribute only because he wasn’t convinced Aubrion could sit still long enough to finish an article. To Noël’s astonishment, though, Aubrion was the first of his contributors to turn in an assignment: a brilliant (though odd) exposé on how the Nazis extorted money for their Christmas dances. As Aubrion weaved through the headstones, he remembered, and he laughed, and he thought.
“Peter Jaan,” Aubrion read, kneeling by a modest gravestone. “All that work, and Peter the Happy Citizen has been dead the entire time!” But what did it mean, that Peter had died? Aubrion knew nothing of this man, of anyone buried here, but if he wanted—if he was curious—he could walk to the records office and hold Peter Jaan’s entire life in his hands. If he cared to do it, Aubrion could excavate the man’s every disappointment, his children, his schooling, he could know the day of his birth and the time of his death, he could rebuild Peter’s friendships from old journal entries and newspaper clippings, he’d know which mates he’d feuded with, he’d know Peter’s secret loves, he’d know how much money the fellow made and whether he was satisfied with it, whether he’d tried to work other jobs and failed, or whether he was content in what he did, and if Aubrion wished it, he could stitch together the man’s tastes from old ledgers and grocery lists and pocketbooks, what kind of wine he liked, whether he was a beer man instead—he could have all of it, he could resurrect this man, he could know everything Peter Jaan put on this earth before leaving it. And so, Aubrion wondered, what did it mean that Peter had died? He was no longer moving, but he still breathed; his body had gone, but his story lingered. And so, Aubrion no longer feared the graveyard. A graveyard was a bookshelf; a story was a beginning and an end.
It was growing late, Aubrion realized, and they’d want him back at the factory. He bid Peter Jaan goodbye, touching his lips to the damp stone; he turned to wave at all the others. Then he returned to the thin, dusty road, tightrope-walking among the dead.
LAST DAY TO PRINT
EVENING
The Pyromaniac
I WALKED BACK to the factory to wander among the machines. The expansiveness of the place—and the people, and the huffing machines—threatened to overwhelm me. Linotype machines, if you’ve ever seen one, are hulking, towering, cobbled-together things. They look, at first glance, like they should not be able to do anything, let alone the delicate w
ork they are capable of doing. When I first saw one, I mistook it for a pile of tinkerer’s scraps.
I found Noël staring absently at a printing press and shouted over the noise, “Can I trouble you with a question?” I said.
“I think I’d welcome the distraction,” said Noël.
“How does the linotype machine work?”
Smiling, Noël beckoned me over. “It consists of four important parts,” Noël explained, pointing. “The keyboard, magazine, casting mechanism, and distribution mechanism. See, the operators are pressing keys on their keyboards, and that horrible sound you hear is the matrices being released from the magazine channel. Each matrix is a piece of metal with a character in it, like a letter or a period or a comma, that corresponds with the characters on their keyboards.”
“So, if they type a K, a K matrix is released.”
“Very good, Gamin. Once they’ve finished a line of text, the corresponding line of matrices is sent over to a casting unit, where lead is injected into the mold. When that’s done, the slug—that’s what we call the piece, you see, after the injection is done—the slug is put into a tray. The original matrices are returned to the elevators where they came from. Look here.”
Noël led me behind the linotype machines, where a woman was holding a tray of these matrices: squarish pieces of metal that were flat on three sides and toothed on the fourth. She laid the pieces out across a machine. The machine in question looked like a metal table, save for the crank mechanism in the belly, the rollers (like rolling pins, only massive and without handles) jutting out of one side, and the chunky nuts and bolts holding everything together. Noting my interest, the woman smiled at me.
“Hello, madame.” Noël gave an apologetic wave. “I do hope we are not bothering you. I’m just showing the lad how it all works.”
“No bother,” she said.
Ferdinand Wellens materialized, looking a tad disheveled, but excited—God, I had never seen anyone so excited. “She is one of the best we have,” he told us. “One of the best in Europe, no doubt. In the world! No one finer than she.”
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