by Susan Daitch
Why bother with Dreyfus taken away at gunpoint? Are new Dreyfuses born every day? Julius traveled to Paris during the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution and returned with Charlotte Corday and Marat cigarette lighters for everyone in the office, as well as condoms printed with pictures of Robespierre that he only claimed to have and showed to no one. For the anniversary of the trial will there be Dreyfus (innocent) lighters and Esterhazy (guilty) condoms, already torn and punctured with sneaky pinprick holes?
Julius was yelling into the phone. I needed to talk to Antonya, but we both listened to him instead. It was unavoidable. The door to his office was open. Antonya was circling want ads with a yellow highlighter.
“Listen, Ratner, you have my deposit just in case, but what I’m saying to you is we’ve got a big contract here and as soon as that payment clears I can catch up on rent.”
Pause.
“La Société de la Preservation du Cinema. That’s who’s got the contract.”
Pause.
“Yes, I’m pronouncing it correctly.”
Pause.
“I know. I know I can’t pay you with celluloid.”
Pause.
“Look, Ratner, you can’t impound my equipment. I’ll never be able to pay you if I can’t work.”
Pause.
“Well, suit yourself.”
Pause.
“You have a point, but if I don’t pay my electric bills and the power is turned off I can’t work either. My company vanishes into paperwork. I declare personal bankruptcy, and you get zilch.”
Pause.
“I know someone else will pay three times what I’m paying in rent, but if Alphabet goes Chapter 11 you better collect top dollar from whoever moves into this dump next. We’re the last in the industry, Ratner. For your information what I do is a dying art.”
Pause.
Julius looked up, saw us listening, put his hand over the receiver, “He just told me to take my extinct horseshoes to Williamsburg — not the Brooklyn one, but the one he heard is in Virginia.”
“You’re no Trump, Ratner, you’re a small-time dinosaur yourself.”
Pause.
“Listen, Frances, prepare yourself,” Antonya whispered. “He’s already spent that contract money he’s talking about. Don’t count on being paid anytime soon. I do the books, so I know. There isn’t any Société paying for this job. It must be some other outfit.”
“Frances, how much longer on the Méliès job?” Julius called out to me, hand over the receiver once again.
I held up seven fingers although I really wasn’t sure how much longer it would take. Julius frowned and kicked the door shut.
The sound of breaking glass interrupted my concentration on a scene from French Cops Learning English. Thinking the noise came from a nearby sound track I tried to ignore it. In the Méliès film four French policemen were learning bilingual puns. The teacher wrote on the blackboard What a fair fish! One of the police responded by writing Va ta faire fiche as if that were the French translation. Then she wrote Very well, thank you. He replied by writing Manivelle Saint Cloud, holding a chalkboard up for the audience to see. The end of the film was chaotic. Four English girls, clearly actors in drag, invaded the classroom and sat on the policemen’s laps, danced with them, and then the whole scene degenerated into wild cartwheels and gymnastics. The sound of things being thrown around persisted.
I looked out my door toward the reception area. The door to Julius’s office was open, and a man I’d never seen before was screaming at him. The room was in disarray. Tables overturned, papers scattered. One of Antonya’s martial arts books had been thrown down the hall and lay a few feet away from me. She was out of the office, perhaps at lunch or doing errands, the whole place seemed deserted, as if the man knew when Julius would be alone or nearly alone. The telephone lay on the floor, disconnected. It would not have been possible to plug it back in and call the police without drawing the intruder’s attention. The only way out of Alphabet was past him, so I was trapped. The man was small and well built, bug eyed. I could make out a pierced eyebrow and elaborate multicolored tattoos of intertwined snakes and ferrets crawling up his forearms. He was scary in the way a rodent is scary: it could run up your pant legs, your dress, it could gnaw into you, you wouldn’t be able to stop it, so you inch your way down the wall, trying very hard not to provoke the creature or man, whoever he was. Then I noticed that he had a knife in his hand, which somehow seemed more dangerous than a gun, which would at least have made some noise. I reached for the Mr. Coffee, not knowing whether I could hit him over the head with it, but then he turned, took it from my hand, and smashed it against the wall, holding a large, curved shard up against my only functioning eye.
“You have three days left. That’s it,” the man said to Julius. Then he left without saying a word to me.
I reached for the phone, but Julius caught my hand.
“Don’t call the police.” He picked his glasses up off the floor with dignity as if the intruder had been nothing more than a phantom, a film projection, something that never happened and should be easily forgotten.
“You’re okay.” This was not a question. “We can get on with our work here and not mention our visitor to anyone.” Julius shut the door to his office, and I wouldn’t see him again for a few days.
I was shaking too badly to return to work that required a steady hand, and so I sat at Antonya’s desk for a few minutes. My impulse was to start cleaning up, but this was a crime scene, and it needed to remain untouched, even if the police were not to be called. When Antonya returned she called the building’s janitor. Asking no questions about the cause of the mess he proceeded to clean up as if minor indoor tornadoes happened every day. As I watched them from my doorway I considered how it might be a good idea to start looking for another job.
Everything in Dreyfus’s world was fixed, stable, he was set on a particular course until his own personal letter bomb was found in the trash, conclusions were drawn and never entirely withdrawn in some quarters. But the accusations leveled at him weren’t completely the result of confusion over handwriting. The army targeted him because they believed he belonged to a rootless tribe and that nomadic nature, according to his accusers, was inherited, not learned. His allegiance to the army must therefore be unreliable. Of course he was the spy. Who else?
It was only a matter of time before apartment walls, furniture, books of family records and photographs all went up in flames. In the scheme of things Field Marshall Pétain and Pierre Laval were only a few decades away, so his stolid, solid life was doomed anyway. It’s easy, looking back, to speed up time so it all passes in a blink. Méliès was busy constructing what it meant to see, record, to bear witness, but he too was threatened by erasure by that same blinking mechanism that reduces years of quotidian misery to the half life of a twinkle.
Stuck in traffic, I daydream. I could be anywhere, bouncing from city to city, my path traced by an animated dot on a turning globe. Driving down Sunset Boulevard, boulevard du Montparnasse, or the Cross Island Parkway approaching the Throgs Neck Bridge, I’m traveling in an unassigned city, a city that becomes a character with arms, legs, hands, and feet of clay. This borough is the head, the people on this block will spill out and clog an artery, this corner was torn up and never rebuilt: the city, an amputee, erases itself. From a distance, it’s a candy city, apartment towers look as if made of waffles with Life Savers water tanks perched on rooftops. I drive closer to them and the metaphor of sweets falls on its face. Barrackslike buildings near a train depot have been gutted, fire escapes and catwalks dangle from crumbling walls; ailanthus, sumac, orange hawkweed, and yarrow grow out of the wrecked foundations. An area of warehouses is transformed into expensive apartments: the city rewrites itself.
The radio is on, tuned to a talk station. General Schwarzkopf, the host says, and a caller picks up the topic, responding with the general’s nickname, Stormin’ Norman, he agrees, the Bear, but his voice
has nothing to do with the view from my car window and I listen indifferently. Image, meaning, plastic: I look at my work as three choices, three pools to dive into, and usually I pick the third. Assessment and repair of the material is my job, but meaning often throws me for a loop. For the Dreyfus job, repairing 780 feet of incendiary film (thirteen minutes, the longest of the lot), I have found out one or two things about the trial of Alfred D. The windows are open as I drive, the radio is on, and I think of another soldier involved in the Dreyfus affair, the German attaché, Schwarzkoppen, who carried on a long affair with Madame de Weede, the wife of a Dutch diplomat. Schwarzkoppen was flirtatious, handsome, a lover of men as well as women: in a careless gesture he tore her letters into twenty pieces later collected by a cleaning lady who became known as the Ordinary Track. He and the Italian attaché, Pannizardi, had a mysterious informer whom they called “Jacques Dubois” after the swindler who proposed to sell them “smokeless gunpowder.” The swindler, Dubois, was actually Esterhazy, the real spy, also known as D or Z.
Dubois = D, who was really Esterhazy also known as Z, not Dreyfus, at all, therefore D = Z.
The incriminating letter signed D signaled Esterhazy. Panizzardi wrote to Schwarzkoppen under the name Alexandrine, calling him Maximilienne: My darling all yours and on the mouth . . . Yes, little red dog, I shall come for your pleasure. I would be capable of stuffing a meter of swaddling in you and all the fourteen-year-old commandants if needed. Their letters are now stored in the archive of the French Ministry of War in a file dated February 1896. Were they a pair of comic bunglers, a Laurel and Hardy of the foreign service?
I pass a car with children fighting in the backseat and a rusting Dodge Dart, windows open and the driver tapping her steering wheel to a turned-up recording of “Bitch with an Attitude.” On my radio the host makes a smooth transition from the war in the Persian Gulf to the need to punish countries who support international terrorism. He speaks of them in terms of badly disciplined children who must be kept in line because they don’t know what’s good for them. Metaphors of weakness, femininity, lunacy roll off his tongue without, it would seem, second thoughts, rehearsal, or plan. All of his speech has the impression of being delivered off the cuff. Hello, you’re on . . . Welcome to . . . A caller points out that America had been pouring military assistance into Iraq for many years. Desert Storm, the caller says, seems to her to have been a very bad idea: misguided, all about oil, really. He cuts her off. You’ve always had people like Patty Hearst around. People who are easily duped into believing revolutionary rhetoric. So-called revolutionary. Implying the caller is one of these, a woman easily fooled, he savors his own cynicism. Whatever happened to Stephen Weed? he asks with a fat laugh. His voice has a cunning, know-it-all, yet slightly self-deprecating tone. It smells of old socks and tickets to the game. I imagine he weighs five hundred pounds, a moon face behind the microphone. No one ever sees him. The traffic moves more quickly, and I turn the radio off. Pigeons or gulls fly overhead in patterns of boomerangs and lotuses.
So far Méliès himself has appeared in many of the reels, especially notable as the leader of the Institute for Incoherent Geography. In this role I imagine him sitting in the passenger seat as I drive. He whistles along with the radio, comments on passing scenery, directs me to turn left or right. Let’s get lost, I say.
“Hello, Frances? It’s Jack. Have you gotten to the end of The Dreyfus Affair yet?”
“No, no yet, but I have a theory about the murdered man.” I suggested the German and Italian attachés. “Both Panizzardi and Schwarzkoppen knew that Dreyfus was being framed by the Army General Staff, so it’s true some would have wanted them dead. Perhaps the dead man was one of them.”
I took another swallow of coffee, suddenly aware of Jack’s breathing on the other end. It was slightly wheezy as if Jack had asthma from time to time.
“Do me a favor, Frances, I don’t have much time; try to unspool the rest of the Dreyfus film.”
“Would you like to come in and see the first minute? That’s all I’ve worked on so far.”
There was a pause filled by a little more wheezing.
“I thought that’s what you wanted, to see the film.” I really wanted him to show up but was trying not to say so. It would have been very simple, just ask, but I was afraid he would outright refuse if I did.
“I do, yes, that’s the idea, but I need to be alone with it. I know how to work a Steenbeck.”
“I can’t allow that. Why can’t we meet? Have we already met? Do I know you?” I leaned back in my chair, put my feet on the editing table.
“I’ll call you soon to arrange a time for me to view the film,” he repeated.
“Impossible without me present.” I enjoyed having what I thought was the upper hand and, now intrigued, wanted to goad him into a meeting, but he was also beginning to make me feel nervous.
“Then this is the last time I’ll be able to telephone you.”
The second, much thicker note arrived a few days later. It was leaning against my door.
Dear Frances,
Some notes:
At the beginning of the affair Dreyfus was nearly released for lack of evidence. History hangs by a drying thread. Meeting at the Section of Statistics the generals covered up for the real spy by inventing documents, and they blocked evidence that would have been damaging to them by claiming that national security was at stake. National Security is a phrase one hears echoed over and over. Let me give you some examples. (Note: what was eventually to be located down the street from the Section of Statistics on the rue de Lille? The famous waiting rooms of Jacques Lacan.)
1972 Break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. At first that case, too, looked insignificant: a matter of small potatoes, lack of evidence to prove otherwise. The trail that led to the president began with initials written in the burglars’ address books: HH and WH. It was difficult to get anyone to talk. “There was a pattern in the way people said no.” The bungled felony appeared to be just a case of five flat-footed burglars, and there was no need to investigate further. But as history now knows, secret cash funds whose purpose was to sabotage the candidates and activities of the other party were eventually traced. The expression “dirty tricks” enters the language in a new way. Also the words “double-cross” and “ratfuck.” The trial goes beyond middle-class lawyers and irked FBI agents. Connections revealed through an examination of checking accounts, telephone and hotel bills led to the Committee to Re-Elect the President and from there to Mitchell and Haldeman. Nixon supervised extensive cover-ups, had documents fabricated, lists shredded, and so the unmasking of bigwigs required a great deal of perseverance. Again secrecy was maintained on the basis of the claim that national security would otherwise be at risk. The notion of shredding became linked to the word cover-up. HH stood for Howard Hunt, who besides working for the CIA, wrote spy novels.
1981 El Mozote, El Salvador. American-trained soldiers massacred over seven hundred civilians, mainly women and very young children. The Reagan administration denied the story and tried to discredit the New York Times and Washington Post reporters who visited El Mozote and wrote about the murders. No one in the State Department ever asked to see their photographs, and so with a clear conscience they were able to release a statement that declared that “no evidence of a systematic massacre” had been found. Because it was necessary for American military assistance to continue, every attempt was made to smear the reporters. They were accused of invention, of hallucination, of being dupes of guerrillas who didn’t speak English. Years later forensic anthropologists found the bodies of 131 children under twelve years of age who had been bayoneted, shot, and hung. The anthropologists determined that the children had been lying on the floor while someone stood over them. Few, if any, had been buried.
One can, as in the Dreyfus case, manufacture anything, and create the context, the circumstances necessary for a story to be believed, and in a lake of whitewash submarines will float.
So while The Dreyfus Affair languished in its can turning into jagged crumbs, residue, and grit, forgers were at work producing letters, doctoring photographs, smearing Zola, who publicly accused the generals of being “diabolical artisans” who “committed outrages against humanity.” His language may sound overblown and heavy handed (in fact it was said in criticism of his writing: “A naked crime is a hundred times more horrible than a crime clothed in adjectives”) but he got the result he was after: attention. When a judge who had been in the army’s pocket convicted him on charges of libel he fled to England during the night under the name Mr. Pascal.
Perhaps the murdered man at the end of The Dreyfus Affair was the man who knew too much. It’s a fact that Zola had many enemies who desired his death, but the murdered man isn’t EZ — that isn’t how he died. Was the man a friend of Zola, someone who might have aided and abetted him in his escape and therefore became a target?
1987 Iran-Contra Affair or Contragate. The National Security Committee operated as a kind of parallel government, setting up illegal deals to continue funding the Nicaraguan contras or “freedom fighters” who burn fields, starve out families, murder children. The hearings revealed an “underworld of arms dealers and financial brokers into which Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North and his fellow National Security Council staff members descended” (“Reagan’s Band of True Believers,” Frances Fitzgerald, the New York Times, May 10, 1987).
