The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  ONE DAY AFTER FAUX SOIR

  EVENING

  The Professor

  VICTOR PASSED THE night in the company of the dead. No one saw fit to tell him that these were Spiegelman’s old quarters, but they did not need to. The professor had made it his business to know things that people did not say aloud. He saw: the walls were naked and cold, the desk bare, all the shelves and cabinets robbed of their intimate things. Victor sat in Spiegelman’s chair, which sagged uncomfortably in the middle. He ran his fingers across the top of the desk. Spiegelman’s hand, over the years, had tattooed the wood in a hundred tongues. In a glance, Victor could see Hungarian, Spanish, German, French, Cyrillic, English—cursive and print—labyrinths of paragraphs—honest, workmanlike letters—tiny sentences—vowels and consonants that dipped and spun with Machiavellian glee—huge, blind man’s text—abandoned letters. Victor was dizzy with Spiegelman’s work.

  The minute hand paced the face of his watch. It was nearly midnight—but he could not sleep, not in Spiegelman’s bed. Wasn’t it bad luck to sleep in a dead man’s bed? The professor had heard that somewhere. He’d done it before, though: in Auschwitz, in Cologne, in Enghien, in a French boardinghouse after the owner passed in his sleep. And he’d slept in his own bed, the bed Victor shared with his wife, after she died. Perhaps this explained his luck.

  The professor knocked on his door to get the attention of the guard outside. The man in uniform put his head in.

  “Would you send someone up to change the mattress?” asked Victor.

  The guard nodded, closed the door. In no time at all, two Germans appeared, and Spiegelman’s mattress disappeared. It was so easy to get things done in this place. If Victor had wanted a mattress changed back at the Front de l’Indépendance base, he’d have to fill out paperwork, put in a request, pay a bribe—and at the end of it all, someone would tell him they didn’t have the funds. Victor knelt before the new mattress. Where did their funds go? Was it all used for mad ventures like Faux Soir? It bothered him that he did not know.

  Victor knocked on his door again. The guard opened it, visibly annoyed.

  “Do you know where they are holding Aubrion and his colleagues?” asked Victor.

  “Downstairs, Professor. In the basement cells. Would you like me to escort you?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Shaking his head, the guard closed the door.

  The professor was, of course, an awkward man. He could never decide on matters of social appropriateness: an academic’s curse. And, of course, Martin Victor was a brilliant academic, the kind of man who could argue his side of a problem for hours, and then mount an equally skillful argument for the other side. It turned decision-making into a tiresome exercise. Victor could make an excellent case for why he should go down to see his former colleagues in their cells, and a comparably excellent case for why he should not. He wondered whether he should apologize, or whether they were past apologies.

  He sat at David Spiegelman’s desk. Victor never had a relationship with the others, not in a friendly way. He took an oath when he joined the FI, and he was the sort of man who regarded oaths as sacred things. But an oath was really just a contract. The men and women of the FI had been his colleagues, and nothing more.

  And now—and yet—there was something here, in this room, in his body, that Victor could not articulate. Something remained unfinished. Spiegelman had pressed his pen into his desk with such conviction that the wood recorded his words. It was a sin to envy the dead, but Victor was only a man.

  The Jester

  When Marc Aubrion was nine years of age, an aunt—in the midst of cutting a peach cake—pointed at the boy with her knife and said: “He’s not a quiet lad, is he?” He had never been a quiet lad, not a day in his life. His parents could not recall his first word; only that he’d shouted it.

  When he got to his cell, Aubrion asked the guards for writing materials. They refused him. And so Aubrion, who could not fill a paper with words, instead filled his cell with noise.

  “My God,” Lada said to Noël, who occupied the cell next to hers. “Did you have any idea he knew every line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

  Noël’s face was pressed to the bars. “I did not think anyone did. Not even Shakespeare.”

  “At least he’s done singing.”

  Upon hearing her, Aubrion decided singing was a splendid idea. He embarked on a twelve-stanza Lithuanian folk song. When it was over, he fell silent.

  But Aubrion could not remain silent for long. If he did—the last time he did—he began to tremble. His cell smelled of burnt paper and antiseptic, and it was growing colder as the night aged. A square of brick, about a foot above his head, had been hollowed out and replaced with iron bars. The breeze still tasted of night. Soon, it would not. When the sun infiltrated his cell, the Germans would come back.

  Death was not an easy thing to think about. The difficulty was not emotional; it was cognitive. To Aubrion, death occupied the same ambiguous category as God, heaven, hell, or what made a good joke. After one of his stand-up routines, someone in the audience had asked him over a drink: “How do you tell the good ones over the bad?”

  “There are no bad jokes,” replied Aubrion. “Only bad storytellers.” In Aubrion’s view, God was the worst storyteller of them all. “What kind of a writer makes characters in his own image?” he used to say. There was no fun in that, he said often: no risk. Predestination was a horrid plot hole. Death, though—that was a good final act. Aubrion tried to think of it that way: as a last bit of character development and nothing more. It did not help in the least.

  Aubrion tried to sing again. He found, however, that his voice was gone. The Germans had left him a jug of water. He’d heard stories, though, about the Nazis poisoning their prisoners’ water with whooping cough. Aubrion did not know whether the Germans planned to detain him at Fort Breendonk prior to his execution, but if they did, he had no intention of spending his last days holding the remains of his own lungs. So, he avoided the water.

  “Marc,” Lada stage-whispered.

  Aubrion dragged himself to the front of the cell to lean against the bars.

  “How are you holding up?” said Lada.

  To his left and right, a pair of guards looked at him as though waiting for his reply. Aubrion shrugged.

  “Marc—” said Lada.

  “That’s enough talking in here,” said one of the guards, as he did every half hour or so.

  “What are you going to do?” taunted Aubrion, finding his voice again. “Shoot us?” To Aubrion’s disappointment, the guard did not reply. “Lada?” he said, to fill the quiet.

  “Yes, Marc?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “I don’t think I have much of a choice.”

  “Would you have wanted children?”

  “My God, really? All right, we can talk about this now. No, I don’t think so.” Tarcovich’s words were doused in acid. “I fear for the children who are being raised in these times. What are they learning?”

  “That the world is so ugly it can make a Hitler?” said Aubrion.

  “It is not just Hitler,” said Tarcovich, “but the fact that he was elected.”

  “What about you, Monsieur Aubrion?” asked Grandjean, from the cell next to his. “Do you wish to have children?”

  “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I never thought about it until recently. There was something that happened the other day, with Gamin... I don’t consider Gamin a child, you understand. But I did wonder, for a moment, how being a father might have been.” Again, Marc Aubrion spoke the name of his friend. “Lada?”

  “Yes, Marc?”

  He wanted to say it aloud: that this was it, they were done. The rain on the prison walls was like the sky tuning up a cello. Lightning shattered the earth. Aubrion’s tongue would not form the words. He wa
s a broken linotype machine, stuck on some ill-used letter.

  “Do you know what I’m going to miss?” he said, flicking a beetle’s carcass off the prison bars. “The taste of good beer. My God, I’d kill a man for a beer.”

  The others laughed—even the guards—at the non sequitur.

  TWO DAYS AFTER FAUX SOIR

  EARLY MORNING

  The Smuggler

  THE GUARDS CAME for Andree first, removing her from her cell at the first yawn of sunlight. Lada whispered “goodbye, my love” as she walked past. To Lada’s dismay, Andree Grandjean did not respond.

  “She did not hear you,” Noël muttered through the bars. But if Noël heard her, surely Andree had, too. Lada fought to tame her panic.

  The Germans came for her a few hours later. They opened Lada’s cell—their pale faces and deep eyes swimming wordlessly in the dark—and motioned for her to turn around. When she obeyed, they chained her wrists and ankles together, so that her limbs felt alien and cold. A guard with plain features tugged her out of the cell. Lada nodded a farewell to Noël, who smiled; she turned to do the same for Marc Aubrion, but the poor man had fallen asleep, and Lada—who’d kicked her dear Aubrion awake after so many nights of revelry—did not have the heart to wake him.

  And then the guards walked her through the building. Lada knew they must have been moving quickly, nearly marching, but her limbs felt carved from lead. Naturally, she saw faces she recognized—Himmler, Manning, the guards who’d been present the first time she met Wolff, a clerk who processed her paperwork—and yet their names stuck in Lada’s throat. The world was a scab that had just been torn away, too raw and painful and sharp everywhere. Himmler supervised the guards as they took her from the base and loaded her into a vehicle, the same sort of vehicle, Lada realized with amusement, she’d stolen to meet Andree Grandjean.

  It was a quick drive to Andree’s courthouse. The car smelled of fresh leather, and the men smelled of old liquor. Lada had her eyes closed the entire time, so she only knew they’d arrived when the driver mumbled, “Fucking hell.”

  “What is it?” asked Lada Tarcovich.

  “Bloody reporters.”

  Tarcovich strained to see out the window. Indeed, milling about on the steps of the courthouse, was a throng of bloody reporters. (“What do you think is the collective noun for reporters?” Aubrion once asked her. “A disappointment? A Biblical plague?”) Most had cameras, which they trained on the car as it approached. Tarcovich laughed, for many wore the journalist’s badge for Le Soir.

  The guard seated next to her pulled on her handcuffs. “Is this your doing? These reporters?” Lada was amused to see terror in his eyes.

  “It’s flattering of you to think so,” she said, “but I’ve actually been in a prison all night.”

  “Keep your head down as we walk inside,” said the guard. “Do not say anything.”

  This proved a difficult task. As Lada and the guards mounted the courthouse steps, reporters shouted and pulled at her. “A word on your capture! Please, just a word!”

  “Turn your head, you whore. Let us look at you.”

  “How many women have you perverted? Dozens? Hundreds?”

  “How long did you think you could fool the Third Reich?” Lada shook their hands off her body, her chains rattling.

  The guards kept her moving until she was in the courtroom. Andree Grandjean was already there, clad in her robes and wig. She arranged her pens and notebooks at the bench, avoiding Lada’s eyes. Tarcovich stood on her toes to see Andree’s face. But the judge did not wish to be seen. Tarcovich was preparing to cry out to her when the Germans grabbed her handcuffs. To Lada’s surprise, they instructed her to sit in the back of the courtroom.

  “Why?” she said. “Am I not being tried?”

  Grandjean banged her gavel. The courtroom fell silent.

  “Bring out the first two,” she said. All the life had gone out of her voice. The courtroom air had been carved from oak and paper. “The prostitutes.”

  Lada’s blood turned cold. A policeman dragged two girls into the courtroom: Lotte and Clara, their hair and eyes in ruins. Clara kept her head high, but poor, small Lotte searched the room in a panic. Tarcovich prayed the child would not see her. When she did, Lotte wept.

  “Lotte and Clara Palomer,” said Grandjean, “you have been accused of prostitution, forgery, and possession of false documents. Do you wish to make a statement in your defense?”

  Lotte spoke. “We are sorry, so sorry for—”

  “No,” said Clara. “We do not.”

  “Then you admit to these crimes?”

  “We do.”

  “Clara!” cried Lotte.

  “I hereby sentence you to twenty years in prison for your crimes, to be served consecutively and immediately.” Andree’s gavel came down. “Next case.”

  The Germans prodded Tarcovich to the bench. Cameras chattered, like insects. They’d let a handful of reporters into the courtroom, the Nazis had. All wore badges proclaiming their affiliation with a collaborationist paper: Volk en Staat, Le Pays Réel, De Gazet, Het Laatste Nieuws, Le Soir. Lada recognized some of them. Jan Brans, the editor-in-chief of Volk en Staat, sat in the front, looking, as always, as though he’d just come to an unspeakable epiphany. Seated next to him, Paul Colin of Le Nouveau Journal made horrible scratches on a pad of paper. The courtroom reeked of camera equipment and hastily applied cologne. It was an extraordinary showing, to be sure. As she approached the bench, Lada Tarcovich had no greater desire than to be unimportant again.

  “Lada Tarcovich,” said Grandjean, looking above Tarcovich’s head. Though her voice remained steady, Andree’s lips trembled. “You have been accused of prostitution, sexual perversion—” The words were an abyss, and Lada fell in, tumbling into nothing. “—sedition, treachery and propagandizing.” Andree’s figure was unrecognizable in the solemn robes. Lada wondered whether she should hate her. “Do you wish to make a statement in your defense?”

  “Look at me,” said Tarcovich, for Andree still would not. She should hate her, Lada knew, for what she did to Lotte and Clara, for what she was about to do to Lada herself. Andree would save herself by locking Lada away, but maybe Lada deserved that. For imprisoning Andree behind the walls of her love, for exiling her to a land of wild schemes, Lada would have a cell of her own. “Please.” Her body was still warm, somehow, from Andree’s touch.

  Grandjean forced her eyes to meet Lada’s. “Do you have anything to say?” she said softly. “In your defense?” Around them, the courtroom sat still.

  “No.”

  “Then do you admit to these crimes?”

  “I admit nothing.”

  “If you confess, I might be able to arrange a lighter—”

  “I am not going to confess anything.”

  Grandjean blinked rapidly. “Do you wish me to repeat the charges?”

  “Why? Am I to defend myself?”

  “The charges are prostitution, sexual perversion—”

  “I know the damned charges,” said Lada. “The only perversion here is that you dare call this a trial. This is a theater, not a courtroom, and I refuse to go on.”

  Behind her, the reporters began to stir, coughing and muttering like playgoers during intermission. Judge Grandjean stood, quieting them. “In light of this—this...” Grandjean held out her hand for a referent, but none came. “I will need to deliberate before sentencing. The court will reconvene in three hours.” After a moment’s hesitation, Grandjean slammed her gavel—but the reporters were already out of their seats, running to their pens and typewriters. Lada could hear nothing over the sounds of tomorrow’s headlines.

  The Jester

  A cadre of eight Germans removed Aubrion from his cell and chained him to Wellens and Noël, but Himmler would have none of it. “No, we must be deliberate,” he told the guards. “People will be
watching. The prisoners should walk in a line, but not chained to each other. When they enter the van, I want them to do it one by one. If they are chained together, it will happen too quickly. This way, they will climb in slowly, their heads bowed.” Himmler began to indulge in a bit of melodrama. “There is always a moment when prisoners realize, truly realize, their fate. The brain comprehends what the eyes are looking at. I want the people to see it when it happens.”

  So, as per Himmler’s instructions, the guards unchained Aubrion and Wellens and Noël. The three of them walked in single file. It was a procession, of sorts, with four Nazis on either side and Himmler bringing up the rear. Aubrion could not help but admire the Nazis’ showmanship. They parked their van—the van that was to transport Aubrion, Wellens and Noël to Fort Breendonk—in the middle of downtown Enghien, so all who’d come to buy their bread and eggs in the town square could see what had befallen the rebels. Wolff would have approved, Aubrion thought. Even his capture was propaganda.

  When the parade was halfway across the town square, church bells chimed the end of morning service. Aubrion looked up, irritated. He found it an improper soundtrack: too joyful to be appropriate, too somber to be ironic. The bells carried on for ages, as though eager to drown out the prattle of chains.

  In front of Aubrion, Wellens and Noël kept their eyes on the van. But Aubrion, being Aubrion, wanted to know his audience. Every five meters or so, he would strain to see around the guards. And that is when he saw me.

  The Pyromaniac

  The night before, someone (probably the Germans) had started a rumor that Marc Aubrion of the FI would be paraded through the streets the following morning. And so I’d ducked behind a butcher’s stand to wait; there, I still sat. I did not move. Every bit of muscle and feeling in my body was directed toward a single task: memorizing the faces of my family. I never got to hear my parents’ final words, and in many ways, this was a blessing; but I accepted the precious curse of playing spectator to my adopted family’s death. Aubrion saw me, and the chains had not stolen his smile.

  Even from that distance, I could see Aubrion was pleased with his audience. The people of Belgium were showmen, too, but terrible at it: though they pretended to go about the day’s business, everyone was watching. Mothers hushed their children, businessmen took an early break, workers poked their heads out of their shops, lads sat together on street corners. The bread line stopped.