The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  Those damned church bells were still chiming, though, so it took us a moment to hear the air raid siren. The wail paralyzed me, cutting straight to my gut. Everyone froze—even the Nazis, even Himmler—all their fears laid bare by the sound. Sickened, we looked to our old enemy, the sky.

  I heard someone curse, or maybe I did it myself. I wanted to stay, wanted it more than anything, but old instincts won out, and I started to run, as we all did, even though running meant nothing. Two dozen bombers flew overhead, in a loose triangle, blocking out the sun with their bodies. I knew who it was immediately. It was the way they flew that tipped me off: the self-righteous perfection of the English.

  Crouched in a gutter, I heard Himmler give the order twice: first in German, and then in French. “To the shelters! The shelters!” His men did not move. Perhaps they did not hear him over Aubrion’s shouts.

  “The RAF!” Aubrion whacked Noël on the shoulder, forgetting he was wearing handcuffs. “Would you look at them, René? It worked, it bloody worked.”

  “Marc.” That was all Noël could say. He had tears in his eyes.

  As the air raid siren wailed, the people of Belgium fled the streets. The Belgian government built shelters shortly before the occupation, and the Germans finished most of them. Every town had at least two; Enghien had six. But the shelters were not large enough for everyone, so the people ran and pushed, forgetting who they were and who they loved. I could not move. I could not look away from Aubrion.

  “Hello there, Bomber Harris! You’re late!” Laughing, Aubrion ran into the town square. The Nazi cadre, who’d turned to flee, looked back in time to see him climb atop the van. I remember this moment with everything that I am. He stood on the roof with his arms raised, as though he was trying to hitch a ride on one of the bombers. Though his hands were still cuffed at the wrists—they must have been; who would have removed the handcuffs?—I do not remember seeing them that way. The way I remember it, Marc Aubrion had no chains.

  I never saw the German guards open fire. All I remember is that Aubrion was laughing, and then he was not—and then he was twitching, dancing with the impact of each bullet. They shot him over a hundred times before the air raid siren stopped.

  In the sudden quiet, I tore my eyes away from my friend. Above, the bombers were beginning to dive. I clamped my hands over my ears as the Germans and Noël and Wellens ran for cover, as Marc Aubrion’s body dropped to the ground. I was braced, ready for the unimpressive sound it would make when it fell. But Aubrion’s timing, as always, was impeccable. The British dropped their first round the moment—the very second—Aubrion’s body hit the cobbles.

  My friend Aubrion was never a fearsome man. He laughed too high and too long, and he had a knack for the unintentional. He forgot to put his coat on in the rain. Still, when Aubrion fell, all of Belgium trembled.

  TWO DAYS AFTER FAUX SOIR

  EARLY MORNING

  The Pyromaniac

  AS IT TURNED OUT, Bomber Harris was not quite as upset as Aubrion and Spiegelman would have liked. The air raid lasted around three minutes, and most of the targets were on the outskirts of town. I watched the RAF strafe an abandoned schoolhouse a kilometer from Enghien. Then they peeled away from the city in a smug circle, disappearing like an afterimage.

  People emerged from their homes, rubbing their eyes and holding their children close. I climbed out of the gutter, assessing the damage along with everyone else. There wasn’t much. The RAF hit a church, but it was an ugly church that no one liked anyway. A shopkeeper noted that they’d made an obnoxious crater behind his apartment building. The Germans would patch it up in a day. I heard people speak of the air raid as though it were a mystery or a hallucination. Only I knew it for what it really was.

  The town recovered, but the Nazis remained in their shelter. No one came to move Aubrion’s body. I saw people approach him, murmuring, wondering at the identity of the man with the large, staring eyes. Word soon got out: it was Marc Aubrion of the FI. That was unremarkable; men from the FI died every day. And so I started whispering—it was him, it was the man responsible for the miracle of Faux Soir. The whispers grew louder. People wanted to know: Was it true? Was it Aubrion? The driver who delivered the “real” Le Soir, the man who first saw Aubrion buy one of each, he could confirm the body’s identity; so, too, could the owners of the surrounding newsstands; so, too, could a handful of lads who Aubrion paid to buy two copies of Le Soir at every newsstand in the city. It was settled, then. This was Marc Aubrion of the FI, the man who’d laughed at Hitler.

  * * *

  It was Hans’s first day at Het Laatste Nieuws, so his boss gave him the easiest job he had. “Stay here,” he’d said, “by the courtroom door. We do not know when Judge Grandjean is coming back, but we want to have reporters in there when she does. As soon as those doors open, come get me.” That was six hours ago. Hans didn’t hear very well, truth be told, but he was fairly sure Judge Grandjean said she was going to deliberate for three hours. Six was at least twice that.

  The air raid had probably slowed things up. Still, this was unusual. The other reporters noticed it, too. Outside the courtroom, the air was putrid with their restlessness: the stink of cigar smoke and perspiration. When seven hours passed, and then seven and a half, Hans’s boss came to see for himself. Surely Grandjean could not be taking this long. She was notorious, Hans knew, for her quick decisions, and the evidence against that queer was overwhelming. And yet no one had heard from her. Exasperated, Hans’s boss summoned the Germans.

  Twelve Nazis divided themselves into two lines. They grabbed a bench from the lobby of the courthouse—eins, zwei, drei!—and slammed it into the courtroom doors.

  Han was not sure what he expected to see inside. What he did know, however, was that he did not expect it to be empty. The Nazis swept the courtroom with their rifles up, in case, perhaps, Grandjean was hiding beneath a chair. They found nothing.

  In the middle of their search, a shout went up in the hallway. “The prisoners! They are not in their cells!” Hans, the lucky man, made this important discovery, so it was he who led the Germans to the empty cells. Lada Tarcovich was gone, Lotte and Clara were gone, and, as the Germans soon found, Andree Grandjean was gone, too, having left her quarters without a trace.

  As the Germans panicked and the Gestapo investigated and the reporters photographed it all, everyone missed an absurd detail. It took them ages to find it. When they did, the discovery caused quite a scene. The detail in question was a slip of paper—thin blotting paper, on which we printed the best and worst newspapers of our time—pasted to the judge’s chair. The paper had a secret to tell, a verdict in Andree Grandjean’s handwriting: GUILTY.

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  “I CONFESS IT took me years to figure out how they did it,” said Helene, answering the question in Eliza’s eyes. She had not written in her notebook in hours. Had she breathed? The old woman couldn’t tell. “In the end, it was simple, like the best of plans.”

  “Simple?” Eliza laughed.

  “It had to be.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It began a few hours prior to the air raid.”

  “Aubrion’s doing?” guessed Eliza.

  The old woman shook her head. “Not Aubrion’s. Not this time.”

  TWO DAYS AFTER FAUX SOIR

  EARLY MORNING

  The Professor’s Witness

  AS WOLFF PROMISED, the Germans escort Martin Victor to the Enghien courthouse. There, he will select a pair of convicts to join him as servants, to carry his belongings across the border. The Nazis flank Victor as he paces the rows of cells, his footsteps echoing like prisoners force-marched to the chambers, excited to bathe for the first time in ages, unknowing and unseeing but there is nothing Victor can do to enlighten them.

  He selects Lotte and Clara, who he recognizes from Tarcovich’s whorehouse. To Victor, prosti
tution is a wretched crime, and he feels no compassion for those who have engaged in it. But God no longer speaks to him about such things. He is a broken man, and he must find mercy in the ruins. The Germans give Lotte and Clara their freedom in exchange for their service. Victor signs the relevant paperwork. With that, the unlikely three set off toward Victor’s apartment to gather what they need for the trip.

  They have walked about twenty paces when Bomber Harris arrives. Victor and the girls duck into a shelter, where the professor shuts his eyes against the terror. He expects the familiar cold sweat, the shaking. But he is oddly calm, even prepared, as the bombs fall and the sirens blare. At the air raid’s end, Lotte and Clara—so young! Sofia was only a bit older when they met—leave the shelter and walk matter-of-factly toward the apartment. Victor follows, squinting up at the bombers.

  The world turns—turned. When the grime and the bony hands and piles of shoes at Auschwitz first came to him, Victor had felt something similar: this piece of the world did not fit into that one, and Victor would spend the rest of his life in-between, sliding between the tectonic halves of these realities. And now Victor felt the same, but different. The Royal Air Force left a prim trail of exhaust in the sky. Each plane wore the little stars of Bomber Harris’s division. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A bouffon with a telex tries to convince the RAF to bomb his country...” But it was not a joke; it was real. It was too absurd to be anything less. Like Auschwitz, like the death squads, this was the way of the world. As God was his witness, a bouffon with a telex could do wondrous things.

  Victor stopped Lotte and Clara, pressing a dozen franc notes into Lotte’s hand.

  “If you are trying to buy us,” said Clara, “I am warning you, we will die first. We have been through enough.”

  “I am not. This is a gift. I want you to run.”

  “What?”

  “Run, now. Please.”

  “Come, Lotte.” Clara grabbed Lotte’s arm.

  Lotte took Victor’s hand. He let her. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  The professor did not answer, only gestured for them to go.

  Victor returned to the courthouse, which was in shock from the air raid. Reporters mobbed the Nazi soldiers on the steps, shouting for answers. Most of the Germans who’d been called to serve that day, to guard Tarcovich and her girls and ensure Grandjean did not leave the building, were new recruits. Some could not even shave; most were Flemish, pressed into service from their farms. They seemed paralyzed now, holding their rifles aloft, unsure whether they had the authority to shoot, and if so, whether it was advisable. The professor walked up to the man with the highest rank. He could not have been older than twenty-one.

  “The prisoners you gave me,” said Victor. “They ran away during the air raid.”

  “Christ,” said the commander, forgetting himself.

  “I am entitled to two servants. Those were the terms of my agreement with the Reich. If you do not supply two additional prisoners immediately, I will give your name and serial number to Herr Himmler.”

  The commander paled. “But I have my hands full here.”

  “You leave me with no choice.”

  “No, please! Go inside. Take two prisoners of your choosing.”

  Victor obeyed. He searched the courthouse for Grandjean, finding her seated by the window in her quarters. The door was open, so Victor went in. Grandjean jumped at the sight of him.

  “Professor Victor?” she said.

  “Do you have extra clothes here?” he demanded. “Rags? Something inconspicuous?”

  “I do, I—”

  “Get them. Hurry.” He tossed her a set of keys. “We have no time at all.”

  “What are these?”

  “The Germans are distracted. You must change out of those robes.”

  “Oh, yes.” Grandjean’s eyes cleared. “Yes, I will.”

  They took the stairs down to the prisoners’ cells. The cells were unattended, as Victor had anticipated, for the Nazis had not yet returned from their bomb shelters. Tarcovich looked small and quiet in her cell, and her hands trembled on the bars.

  “My God,” she said, when she saw them. Grandjean tossed her a set of rags. She understood immediately, and changed without comment.

  The three ran back upstairs and through the empty courtroom. Victor could hear the reporters threatening to riot outside the door. They spoke Tarcovich’s name, and Grandjean’s, and they shouted Marc Aubrion’s. Grandjean led the way to a back entrance, urging Victor and Tarcovich to follow her outside, assuring them no one would see their exit.

  “Where are all the Germans?” asked Tarcovich.

  “Aubrion’s scheme worked,” replied Victor.

  Tarcovich laughed. “No, you can’t be serious. The RAF?”

  “We have to go while the Germans are still in the bomb shelters.”

  They were nearly free, the three of them, nearly out the back entrance and in the streets, when Tarcovich put a halt to the escape.

  “Wait,” she said, taking Andree’s hand. The two shared a smile that made Victor’s heart weep. “Andree, haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “What’s that?” said Grandjean.

  “You owe the people a verdict.”

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  “COME WITH ME,” Helene said to her companion, rising from her seat.

  The young woman tucked her leather notebook under her arm. “Where are we going?”

  “To a coffeehouse.”

  They left the blue-doored building. As they walked, the city seemed to shrink in the abandoned quiet of evening. The cobblestones hurt Helene’s feet. Sometime in the last decade, the city had paved over the old streets, masking the stones with concrete. But patches had worn away, baring the stubborn honesty of the city below.

  “Eliza, let me ask you,” said Helene. “Did your parents ever tell you why Victor did it?”

  “All I know is what he told them.”

  “And what is that?”

  “He said he couldn’t grasp what he saw at the concentration camp. It was so illogical—the idea that people could do these things to each other—everything seemed to lose meaning, after that. You said it best. Victor thought it was his moral and intellectual responsibility to accept the new reality that the Nazis had created. But when he saw what Aubrion had done, he realized he’d been going about it the wrong way. The only way to deal with the absurdity of evil is with equal and opposite absurdity.”

  Helene allowed her laughter to carry her through the runaway streets. “Well said. There’s hope for you and that notebook yet.”

  Eliza’s features shifted in the dim. “Helene, there’s a part of the story you don’t know, an important part. My parents gave it to me. They made me promise to give it to you.”

  The old woman nodded. “I am ready to receive it.”

  “Lada and Andree thought they did not want children. It was like Lada said to Marc Aubrion—Hitler was elected, and what kind of a world is that? But they decided that was precisely why they should have children.”

  “Good,” said Helene.

  “Long before they adopted me, though, they came back.”

  “To Belgium?”

  “To look for you, at the end of the war. They knew you must’ve survived it all. I heard so much about you, as a girl. My mother—Lada said they searched for months. But they ran out of money before they could find you. They made me promise to continue their search.”

  The old woman thought about that. “What else have I missed?”

  “Neither Wellens nor Noël survived the camps. And Theo Mullier died in Fort Breendonk. The linotypists and printers, the men and women at Wellens’s factory—they were captured and executed for their crimes.” Eliza’s eyes and face were delicate; they reminded Helene of those precious objects in
the blue-doored museum, the bits of glass and obstinate little jewels that should not have lived through the war. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Never apologize for telling the truth.”

  “But Martin Victor fled to France, to Haute-Savoie. He worked for the International Labor Organization until he died. No one knew who he was, in the end.”

  “It’s all he wanted.” The old woman stopped to lean against a wall. Every centimeter of her skin felt part of another time. “Thank you for telling me what became of them all.”

  “I’ve waited so long to give you that gift,” said Eliza. “But what about you?”

  “What of me?”

  “What became of you, when the war ended?”

  Helene shrugged, unsure what she was asking. “I returned to France.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I did no great deeds, and I haven’t died.”

  Eliza mirrored Aubrion’s look of naked curiosity. “Does that sadden you?”

  “The only reason I am alive,” she said, and the gray and neon streets felt impossibly new, “is because I failed. Aubrion, Noël, Wellens, Spiegelman—their deaths were the product of their great deeds. I failed, I lived, and so I had to leave Belgium. If I’d stayed, everything would have reminded me of my failure, and of Marc Aubrion.”

  Helene kept walking, breathing in the jagged remains of her story. Eliza lingered for a moment, then ran after her.

  “But that can’t be all of your story,” she said.

  “I doubt you have room in your notebook for more. What are you going to do with it all, anyway?”

  “Like I told you before. People should know.”