The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  The Pyromaniac

  The German response to the explosions was far slower than I’d expected. By the time I heard the first sirens, Jean and the lads had already thrown a half dozen of my pipe bombs into the parking lot behind the Le Soir factories. Nazi brigades rarely used sirens to announce their presence, opting instead to shock their victims in their last moments. And so, it took me a while to connect the sirens to what was about to occur: namely, my swift capture and execution.

  “There! There!” a commander said in German, pointing at me. His face was apocalyptic with fury. I had hardly moved from where I’d fallen, knocked dizzy from the explosion, but the other boys had disappeared. As the Nazis opened fire, I got up and ran—fell again, jamming my shoulder into the concrete. The Germans could not see me in the smoke—or so I assumed, for I could not see them—and mistook several workers running out of the factory as their targets. They fired everywhere—lost, erratic—and I ran like mad. My shoulder did not hurt until I was halfway down the city block. I screamed at the pain, which radiated up and down my arm like some manner of infestation.

  Biting back tears, I swerved down alleys and behind walls. The Germans were famed for their detailed maps of the streets, but maps were lies. I knew the city better than anyone: where to go, where not to go. I ran three blocks away from the factories, then doubled back. While I was fairly certain I’d lost them, I wanted to be sure. An arthritic church, centuries old and nameless, sat behind the factories. I ran into the courtyard and wedged my body into a well, covering myself in dirt and moss. Though I could still hear the sirens, I knew I’d lost them. The Germans would not find me there.

  In the safety of my hiding place, I allowed myself to cry. The memory of this—the smell of peat, a faint rumble of thunder—still lives in me. But I cannot say what made me weep. I know I cried for Leon and everyone else who’d died because of me. I cried for failing Aubrion. I was in pain, and I feared for the lives of my family, the loss of my home. But more than anything, I wept for Faux Soir. This grand adventure was over. There would be no more schemes, no more capers, no more plots, no more escapes. The stories about it would become legends, and the legends would become myths.

  And what would become of me? Where would I go, who would I be? I think many of us, the survivors, felt that way after the war. Those who were alive had to figure out how to live. Those who were dead never had to write the rest of the story.

  The Jester

  Noël parked his Nash-Kelvinator a block from the largest newsstand in the city, a shop owned by three generations of printers. A raucous line of customers snaked out the door, down the street. Aubrion got out of the passenger side of the car, standing back to observe.

  What struck him most was their variety of emotions. People were, at once, quietly terrified, anxious, curious, excited. Those in the back of the line, who faced a wait of an hour or more, had brought blankets and sandwiches. “Don’t spoil it!” they said to the lucky ones who’d already bought a copy. “Keep it to yourself, will you? Give the rest of us a chance.” Entire families joined the line; women swapped recipes; children played. A foreigner who visited Enghien on that particular day might have wondered about this strange holiday.

  “Magnificent!” said Aubrion. Seconds after the word escaped him, an unmarked van pulled up.

  The driver got out, allowing the engine to idle. He was a large man who looked, to Aubrion’s eyes, like a farmhand. Indeed, he unloaded his papers the way one might unload a barrel of hay. The man threw his stack of papers to the ground and reached into the van to grab another. He froze, a cigar falling from his lips.

  “Fuck,” said Aubrion.

  “Christ,” said Noël.

  His eyes on the queue and his cigar on the pavement, the driver marched into the shop. Aubrion beckoned to Noël. They listened outside the door. The man began shouting: “But I am the driver for Le Soir. Have been for two years.” And then: “What the hell are you going on about? Run and fetch your father, boy. He knows me.” Finally: “See what I told you? See what I bloody told you? Something odd is happening here.”

  Those in line began to sense it, too. They murmured to each other, their eyes and feet shifting nervously. “It’s a test. A bloody test. I know it.” Some of the men had sent their wives and children away. The businessmen, who had the most to lose, were the next to go. As the driver and the shopkeepers argued, the line dwindled to almost nothing.

  “Pocket change.” Aubrion patted Noël’s trousers. The director pushed him away. “René, you said you had pocket change.”

  “Here, here, steady on.” Noël deposited about two francs’ worth of coins into Aubrion’s hands. Aubrion started toward the shop, but Noël held him back. His eyes were low, his voice tight with fear. “Marc, are you quite sure about this?”

  “You must trust me, René.”

  The would-be customers quieted down, fascinated by a new development. A lanky little man, stubbled, with scarecrow-trousers and wide eyes and handfuls of coins—this man was walking up to the shop. His shirt was too large, but he swaggered like a man dressed in silk. This fellow cleared his throat to get the shopkeepers’ attention. Everyone watched.

  “Can I help you?” asked the eldest shopkeeper.

  “I would like to buy two copies of Le Soir.”

  The oldest shopkeeper glanced at his son, his grandson, and the driver, who looked rather like his lunch had been spoiled. “I am not sure how to put this,” said the shopkeeper, “but we are not sure which version of Le Soir is the right version.”

  “I know that,” said Aubrion.

  “You know which version is the right one?” said the driver.

  “No, no. In my mind, they are both the right one.”

  “How do you mean?” said the shopkeeper.

  “They are both for sale, are they not? And that is what matters, isn’t it?”

  “Then—in that case—which copy would you like, monsieur?”

  “As I said, two copies.” Aubrion dumped his change on the counter. “One of each.”

  The Gastromancer

  The eye of the pistol flickered between Spiegelman’s face and body. Spiegelman guessed that August Wolff had never shot anyone. He gave the order; he did not pull the trigger. His body and the bodies of his victims were demarcated by someone else’s gun. It was odd, almost sickening, to see the Gruppenführer tremble this way.

  “You are under arrest,” Wolff said, but he was not accustomed to saying such things, and the words sounded rigid, immobile, like he’d memorized a phrase in another language. The Gruppenführer tried again, speaking deliberately. “For treason against the Reich.”

  “What treason did I commit?” Spiegelman attempted a laugh. The sound was inhuman. “Is it a crime to walk about the base?”

  “Why were you using the telex?”

  “I was not—”

  “Put your hands up, Herr Spiegelman.”

  Spiegelman complied.

  The Gruppenführer’s shoulders heaved. “I forgave you,” he said. “You sinned, and I forgave you. I tried to protect you, don’t you see? Your beautiful talent...”

  Spiegelman’s stomach twisted. In his time of servitude to the Reich, an older statesman once put his cold, clammy hand on Spiegelman’s thigh. Wolff’s compliment felt no different.

  “This is protection?” Spiegelman nodded at Wolff’s gun. “This is imprisonment.”

  “If I’d allowed you to wander free, you would have—”

  “So you don’t deny it.”

  “I am not here to defend myself.”

  “Just to shoot me.”

  “Keep your hands up, Spiegelman.” Wolff shook his head, his eyes fraught with tears. A thrill of shock went through Spiegelman’s body. “Such a waste. There is nothing I can do for you now, you understand. You will be sent to Fort Breendonk tomorrow, executed before the end of the
month.”

  The reality of his fate had been no secret to David Spiegelman. Still, hearing it aloud—hearing it consummated by Wolff’s words—that was something different.

  “I am sorry,” said the Gruppenführer. “I did everything I could, and yet I failed you.”

  Spiegelman’s pulse quickened. “Do not feel sorry for yourself on my account. You have an inspection to worry about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Himmler’s inspection.”

  Wolff waved the pistol, an awkward shrug. “I have nothing to hide.”

  Spiegelman’s heart was beating, harder and stronger than it ever had, for Wolff, the dybbuk, was his: he belonged to Spiegelman and no one else. “You are a liar, August Wolff.”

  “What do you mean?” whispered August Wolff. “What have you done?”

  “Your memos.” Spiegelman went on: “Never a word of truth in them, was there? Never how you truly felt about burning those buildings, destroying those books. I know your heart, Wolff—and now Himmler will, too.”

  The Gruppenführer wore the expression of a man who was falling from a great height. “My memos.” Wolff mouthed the words.

  “I made them honest.”

  “You rewrote them.” The sentence took on a life of its own, the way propaganda did.

  “November 6, —43,” Spiegelman recited from memory. “First of what promises to be many library fires this month. Library of the Covenant of the Three in Brussels. Managed by a man and his wife, family name Levant. Contained a wealth of perverse and illegal works: books on Jewish cultural thought, lurid poetry, several books on homosexuality and the mind of the cross-dresser, at least a dozen tomes glorifying deviant behavior. The fire destroyed all. That is what you wrote. But that isn’t what you meant to write, is it?” Spiegelman stepped forward, daring Wolff to shoot him before he was done. “November 6, —43. First of what promises to be many library fires this month. Library of the Covenant of the Three in Brussels. Managed by a man and his wife, family name Levant. And so we continue to burn without reading, kill without learning. The work is lurid, perhaps perverse—as is everything before we open it up and peer inside to know it well. Our sword is blunt. We are blind.”

  Wolff lowered his pistol. “That is what you wrote?”

  “That is what I wrote,” said Spiegelman.

  “You replaced my memos.”

  “That is how you truly felt.”

  Spiegelman spread his hands, and he knew Wolff must shoot him, this Jew, this queer, this traitor. And yet he could not. The dybbuk could not leave the body of his victim until his task was done. Spiegelman felt as though he could shout, as though the echo would outlive every man and woman on this earth.

  The eye of Wolff’s pistol searched the floor. Spiegelman had heard murmurs of strange pills the Nazis took to shed their fear and inhibitions, and he felt as though he too had taken such a pill, and had become hyperaware of everything: the veins in Wolff’s hands, the crackle of a lightbulb about to burn out, a small hole in Spiegelman’s left shoe. His heart had stopped, or it would never stop. David Spiegelman smiled—oh God, he smiled. He and his brother used to sit in a tree for hours, eating apples from the branches and making crude jokes about their neighbors, and he smiled like that, like he’d never climbed down from the tree. They would let their legs dangle from the branches as long as they liked, telling stories of heroes and poets and mythic beasts, of specters who walked among men.

  The Dybbuk

  Strange noises raged in Wolff’s ears. Some were familiar, some were new. He did not try to understand them. Wolff lifted his gun and shot David Spiegelman twice: once in the chest, and once in the head. He waited for Spiegelman’s body to fall. When it did, August Wolff turned the pistol on himself.

  You now know this story as well as I do. You know, by now, that August Wolff was not a stupid man. He was a pitiful one, and a sad one, but not a stupid one. I cannot be sure of his last thoughts, of course, but I imagine that sometime between the first bullet and the third, Wolff must have understood what Spiegelman had done for him. By stripping away Wolff’s lies to expose the trembling, honest voice beneath, Spiegelman had given him a gift: his last words.

  HITTING THE STANDS

  EVENING

  The Jester

  “ONE OF EACH!” became a rallying cry of sorts. No sooner had Aubrion stepped out of the newspaper shop than the next man in the queue made the same request. “One of each,” he said to the astonished shopkeepers. “I’ll have both copies of Le Soir, if you please.” In minutes, customers started returning to the line. “One of each!” The driver who’d delivered the “real” Le Soir was distraught: “That’s not the right one.” The customers had an easy answer: “How are we to know that?”

  “And that’s the trick to it,” Aubrion said to Noël. They’d climbed back into the Nash-Kelvinator to repeat the exercise at another newsstand. “If the Nazis come knocking, Peter the Happy Citizen can say he had no way of knowing which was which. Of course he wanted to buy the true Le Soir, but he had to buy both to do that!”

  “It’s bloody wonderful,” said Noël.

  “I don’t do things that aren’t bloody wonderful.”

  “But how are we to do it at every major newsstand in the country?”

  “That, dear René, is the easiest part.”

  Aubrion and Noël found the same situation at Rapide!, the newsstand catering to Enghien’s financial district. Smirking at Noël, Aubrion marched up to the stand and ordered one of each. When the queue had returned to its former health, Aubrion stopped a lad running messages through the city.

  “How would you like to make a bit of easy coin?” he asked the boy, who looked wary. “I’ll give you twelve francs.”

  “Twelve?”

  “Are you a parrot or a boy?”

  The lad huffed. “I’m a man!”

  “Well, man, run to every newsstand within five kilometers of here and buy two copies of Le Soir. Tell them you want one of each—they’ll know what you mean. Le Soir is forty-eight cents, so you will have forty-eight cents left over if you buy two copies at twelve newsstands.” Aubrion caught Noël checking his math on his fingers. “These are the old francs, too. The good stuff, you understand? If you do your job right, you can keep what’s left over.”

  “How do you know I won’t just snatch it all up?”

  “Because I am Marc Aubrion of the FI, and I have ways of knowing such things.”

  That was good enough for the lad. He took the money and ran off to do his job.

  Aubrion found a small militia of boys to carry out this work, exhausting the money he and Noël had on them. It was a brilliant scheme. In newsstands across Belgium, Faux Soir sold out, and it sold out again when Wellens’s trucks replenished their supply. As the sun set, and Wellens’s drivers went into hiding, the news of the zwanze caper was on everyone’s lips. “I did not want that!” people whispered between laughs. “Look at the bit on page four. It nearly killed me.” Aubrion had not seen the people smile this way in years. He felt infected with their joy. It clung to him like perfume, and he could not run from it.

  Nor could he run from the Germans. They talked about running, Aubrion and Noël did, but there was no sense in that. The Nazis would catch them, at the border or in town. “We should make something of the time we have left,” Aubrion decided. And they did, until the Germans caught up with him and Noël at the sixth newsstand they visited that day. When Aubrion went inside to order one of each, a cadre of men in uniform were waiting for him. “What have I done wrong? I am a humble citizen, here to buy a newspaper.” No one would speak to him, so Aubrion did what Aubrion often did: he threw a punch. He hit the commanding officer in the mouth, splitting his lips and painting his teeth red. Even so, Aubrion fought halfheartedly, and Noël did not fight at all. They knew how this story would end.

  The people
of Belgium watched as Aubrion and Noël were put in chains and loaded into armed vehicles. “This newsstand is closed,” shouted the commander, “pending an official investigation.” Everyone was ordered to disperse—which they did, lest they be shot as co-conspirators. Before Aubrion ducked into the back of a German van, he watched crowds of dirty workmen and children and clerks with parted hair and families—laughing, dancing crowds of them—carrying their picnic baskets to newsstands in other towns. They hurried; they had to. If they walked quickly enough, they could get there before the Gestapo.

  The Smuggler

  Andree Grandjean dropped a copy of Faux Soir on top of Lada’s pastries. The paper sank a little, until Lada could see the greasy outline of the onion bread on the plate beneath. This was all so absurd that Lada felt she must have taken a bullet to the head already, that she must be hallucinating as she breathed her last on the grubby cobblestones. In short, Lada did not know what to say.

  Grandjean spared her. “I liked your paper.”

  “Oh?” said Lada, with great effort.

  “When is the next issue to be released?”

  “Tomorrow at four o’clock,” answered Lada, “but it won’t be nearly as good.” Andree laughed, and Lada had never heard anything quite so sad. Tarcovich nodded at the seat across from hers. “Join me, will you? I have some—well—” She extracted Faux Soir from her pile of pastries, wiped them off, and offered a pastry to Andree.

  They admired the view with the quiet reverence of tourists. The fog and setting sun painted the alluvial clouds red and orange, illuminating a fantastic scene: eager customers who’d heard about this strange paper, newsboys plotting to spend their newfound wealth, workers who decided to take the rest of the day off to read, clergymen and butchers running to catch the last few copies before they sold out. Lada and Andree did not speak. There was far too much to say.