“People knew.”
She sped up to get in front of Helene. “There has to be more than failure.”
“There’s always failure at the end. René Noël used to say that.”
“He was a pessimist. What about Marc Aubrion?”
The old woman kept silent until they arrived at the coffeehouse—the same coffeehouse, she told Eliza, where Lada Tarcovich sat to watch the people of Belgium give up their coin for a farce, where Andree Grandjean came to sit beside her. Nothing had changed, except that everything was older. Helene ordered coffees for herself and Lada’s daughter. They sat outside.
“You are right,” she said. “There was more than that, at the end.”
“Wasn’t there?” said Eliza, her face bright. This girl had picked her pocket, Helene realized, rummaging around for tall tales. She was a better thief than Gamin had ever been.
“I’ll tell you the last bit.” Helene warmed her hands on the mug. “The Germans left Aubrion’s body in the street for hours. After a time, I went back for him.”
TWO DAYS AFTER FAUX SOIR
EVENING
The Jester and the Girl
AUBRION’S HANDS WERE COLD. I held on to them and dragged my friend behind the ruined church. I wasn’t a weak child, not by any means, but I had not eaten in a good while, and my knees trembled. Looking at his face would have torn me up, so I struggled not to. After a good few minutes of work, I paused under a tree to rest.
I still had a few matches in my pocket, and as I said, my friend was cold. The first match, wet from my own perspiration, would not light. I had better luck with the second. In seconds, a tiny flame smirked at me from the tip of the match. I threw it into a patch of dry grass. It spread like water, illuminating everything.
The fire grew, and I let it, sitting back on my heels with Marc Aubrion. When the flame had expanded to three times its initial size, I said goodbye to my friend. Aubrion, as you now know, had a great deal of words in him. He was a loud character, my friend was. Every syllable he put on paper was a color I’d never seen, a musical note that had never been played. And so my farewell was wordless. He said all that needed to be said, in my view: enough for both of us.
We lay together in the shadow of the church, as comfortable as we’d ever been. I made up stories, to pass the time, about things that never happened. I fell asleep in the company of old friends. When I awoke, the Germans were still searching for him. Their torches died with the sun, but Aubrion’s fire burned long into the night.
* * *
AUTHOR NOTE
I first “met” the original ventriloquist, Marc Aubrion, in my senior year at UC Berkeley. While doing archival research for my thesis on underground literature, I came across a document written by five women who worked for the Office of War during World War II. “The task of distributing [an underground publication],” they write, “poses special hazards. The [distribution] network may include a priest on his rounds or a policeman on his regular beat. A bundle may be smuggled aboard a steamer or concealed under the coal in the tender of a locomotive.” They go on to mention a stunning exploit: “The patriots seem to take delight in including the Germans on their distribution routes. To get a wider public among the Germans, the patriots insert articles in the German-controlled press or manage to fake a whole edition. The Belgians sold sixty thousand copies of the Nazi Le Soir [Faux Soir] on the streets of Brussels on November 9, 1943.” (In the novel, I changed the date to the 11th to correspond with Armistice Day.) Further research revealed that the Belgians wrote and distributed this paper in only eighteen days. A writer, Marc Aubrion, orchestrated the most elaborate feat of satire Europe has ever seen: the grandchild of Voltaire and the ancestor of Improv Everywhere.
Which characters were real?
Because the operation unfolded in secrecy, we know very little about Aubrion or his colleagues. However, we do have some broad character sketches. Marc Aubrion himself was a real person: a relatively minor journalist who wrote and edited articles for the resistance newspaper La Libre Belgique. He came up with the idea for Faux Soir on October 19, 1943, and wrote most of it in what his friends described as an “excited fury.” René Noël, director of the Front de l’Indépendance (FI) press department in Brabant and Hainaut, did indeed supervise the project. Aubrion and Noël were assisted by Ferdinand Wellens, a flamboyant printer and businessman; Theo Mullier, a member of the FI who infiltrated the Nazi-controlled Le Soir factories; Andree Grandjean, a barrister; Pierre Ballancourt and Julien Oorlinckx, both linotypists; and at least one “youth partisan” who has remained nameless—or, rather, who I named Gamin. Professor Victor Martin (I switched his first and last names for the book) was a sociologist who spied for the FI and wrote one of the first investigative reports on Auschwitz, but he did not participate in the Faux Soir caper.
Though David Spiegelman, Lada Tarcovich and August Wolff are all fictional, they are echoes of real identities. It was rare, though not unheard of, that a Jewish or queer person would be granted immunity if they offered their services to the Reich. And prostitutes—queer or not—often operated smuggling rings with a variety of unlikely allies, from priests to farmers to children; the FI credited part of Faux Soir’s success to its network of smugglers, who made sure people all over the country, and then all over Europe, were able to secure a copy. Although Wolff the reluctant Nazi isn’t based on anyone in particular, he is representative of a (sadly) common character: someone who could have given a voice to the oppressed, but didn’t.
How many of these events actually happened?
Faux Soir is a story of everything going wrong in precisely the right way. Aubrion and Noël initially had trouble procuring the funds they needed for the project, so they enlisted the help of a barrister, Grandjean, renowned as a “puppet-master” who could get people to do what she wanted. While details of their initial meeting are hazy, we do know that the brash Aubrion alienated her at first. However, Grandjean soon came around, and she ultimately raised fifty thousand francs nearly overnight.
News of the endeavor made its way to businessman Ferdinand Wellens, who then requested a meeting with Noël. The FI made plans to abandon the operation, certain Wellens was going to demand a bribe in exchange for keeping quiet about Faux Soir. But as it turned out, Wellens was no friend of the Nazis, and he offered his factories to the FI.
After securing funds and printing materials, Aubrion and his colleagues wrote Faux Soir in only eighteen days—less time than it took me to read about the experience.
To disrupt the normal Le Soir distribution routes and get Faux Soir onto the streets in its stead, Aubrion conceived of two distractions. As part of the first distraction, a youth partisan would bomb the Le Soir vans before they began their daily route; the youth miscalculated and bombed them a day early. As part of the second distraction, the FI would convince the Royal Air Force (RAF) to stage an air raid on Brussels; the RAF miscalculated and arrived a day late. So, certain newsstands did in fact receive “one of each” version of Le Soir, and customers bought both. Despite these missteps, sixty thousand copies made it onto the streets before the Gestapo figured out anything was amiss.
How much of the book’s Faux Soir text is real?
All of it! Everything—the text, the Hitler photographs, the German communique, Spiegelman’s parody of Maurice-Charles Olivier’s overwrought prose—was lifted from actual copies of Faux Soir. All of it is Aubrion’s genius.
Did any copies of the paper survive?
For reasons I can’t begin to imagine, the amazing story of Faux Soir has mostly been forgotten. But when the paper was first released, people cherished their copies and passed them down to their children. As such, multiple copies have survived.
Funny story: when I finished my senior thesis, I searched for a copy of the real Faux Soir and found that at least six still exist. I bought myself a copy from an antiques dealer as a graduation gift...the
same day that my partner bought me a copy as a graduation gift, from the same antiques dealer.
Who survived the joke?
Sadly, most participants didn’t make it out alive. “At the Kommandantur,” one Nazi official wrote, “we pretended to accept the thing with fair play. ‘Well done,’ said an influential German officer, ‘but the gentleman who did this will be shot with silver bullets.’” Within two months of the event, the Gestapo had captured everyone involved. As I mentioned in the book, Wellens and Noël were sent to labor camps from which they never returned. The printers and linotypists, including Ballancourt and Oorlinckx, received sentences of four months to five years in prison. Aubrion was either sentenced to death or fifteen years in prison; we can’t say for sure. Only Victor Martin emerged from the war unscathed: he escaped from prison camps not once but twice, and retired to Haute-Savoie with his wife and children in the late 1970s. He died in 1989.
In January 1944, the secretary general of the FI memorialized Faux Soir with a brief eulogy in a resistance pamphlet: “We never forget that in the heart of the home front battles, we are men to whom nothing human is alien. Let us perpetuate a tradition of smiling during wartime. Not just that of Gavroche [...] but that of Peter Pan. With his humble slingshot, David killed Goliath. With a few well-guided blows, we will crumble the colossus with feet of clay.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Each book is a collection of stories—not just the ones on the page, but the ones behind every plot decision, every semicolon, every rejection, triumph, loss and obsession. I want to thank the characters in the story of this book.
This novel would not be in the world if not for my agent, Kristin Nelson. Kristin, “thank you” feels inadequate. Your tenacity and encouragement have made me a published writer—but more importantly, you’ve made me a better one. Every time I’m stuck on a plot point, I am grounded and guided by your refrain: that you’re looking for a good story well told. Because of you, Kristin, I can keep telling stories. Here’s to the next one, and the next.
Thanks also to the rest of the NLA family. Jamie, thank you for opening the door for a story about a newspaper heist. I’m forever grateful. Angie, thank you so much for your thoughtful, comprehensive edits and comments.
Thank you to my editor, Erika Imranyi at Park Row Books, for your support and insight. Thank you to Natalie Hallak for incisive, thoughtful edits. This is a better book because of you.
Professor Ron Hassner read the novel when it was a paper about underground literature and rebellion that I wrote for his seminar; Professor Steve Fish read the novel when it was my thesis on the same topic. I think I’ve learned that the key to good mentorship is striking a balance between “That looks interesting and perilous! I’m going to wait and see what happens here” and “That looks interesting and perilous! I’m going to step in before it explodes.” This novel would not exist if you two had not struck that balance. Thank you both.
Graham Warnken and Alice Ciciora were my first readers. They were in the trenches with me as I was writing the novel; they helped me work through plot and character problems; they endured the submission process with me. Though I am not a spiritual person, the best adjective I can use to describe their role is sacred. The only way I can thank you two for your role in this journey is by spending the rest of my life writing things you’d want to read. So I will.
Anna Flaherty read the book in one gulp. Your unbridled enthusiasm for the story was everything that I needed. Thank you.
Sherry Zaks was (and is always) my very first reader. Every morning when I wake up, Sherry asks, “Are you going to make me a book?” And every morning when I wake up, Sherry helps create a world so beautiful that I want to make her a book, and another, and another. Sherry, thank you. I love you. Let’s keep making stories together.
The day that Park Row decided to buy my book, Sherry and I took a walk and stumbled across some graffiti. It was an image of a spaceship midflight, grinning with the words The World Is Yours. The Ventriloquists is based on a true story of people who realized the world was theirs, even if their country was not, who decided it was worth risking their lives for a joke that had never been told. We are still plagued by the forces of ignorance and oppression that took Belgium’s typewriters—but the world is ours if we stand up and make it so. To that end, I extend my deepest gratitude to the real-life ventriloquists who inspired this story. Monsieur Aubrion, this book is yours.
ISBN: 9781489286581
TITLE: THE VENTRILOQUISTS
First Australian Publication 2019
Copyright © 2019 Roxanna Ramzipoor
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