Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  A week later Auguste wanted to be taken to the church of Sainte Clotilde. She wanted to go so badly and expressed the need with such urgency I thought there might have been a pile of money hidden in one of the apses, something taken from the Germans, a crime much advertised but never resolved. My mother could wait forever, but I would take matters into my own hands.

  “I have to deliver my cônes.” She showed me a bag of sweepings culled from the garbage. Besides papers the bag also contained rotting orange peels, apple cores, lumps of stale bread. In the shadows a silver stream of light, dust motes floating in it, hit the upheld bag.

  “Henry will be waiting for me.”

  “Who is Henry, Auguste?” I thought Henry was an imaginary lover that Auguste had invented for herself years ago. Cradling the greasy bag of garbage she looked maternal and childish at the same time. I hoped no one would see me. Auguste embarrassed me, but I had entered into a kind of bargain with her. Again I took her hand, and we walked into the street. The rain had left the sidewalk cleaner than usual, and I heard an urgent clacking of heels before I actually saw Madame Gilberte.

  “Where’s your mother? I saw another rat.” This was a ruse. The building was full of rats. What did I or anyone else care? Why complain to me? Pulled along the curb by her terrier, she finally planted both feet on the ground in front of us. “This one was as big as my dog.” She tossed her veil back over her head so she could smoke, a sign she was going to loiter for a few minutes while he strained on his leash, nose to the ground.

  “Where are you girls off to?” Madame Gilberte seemed to take an unusual interest in our welfare at inopportune moments.

  If I asked her to leave me alone, she would call my mother. I thought of telling her I was taking Auguste to the bank, but in her meddling way, she would have insisted on accompanying a minor and a nutcase.

  “She’s taking me to church.”

  Madame Gilberte’s face expressed contradictory and conflicting sentiments: how nice and how disgusting. If she suspected we weren’t really going to church, she only said, “Of course, that’s what I thought. You’re wearing black.” Auguste, dressed entirely in black, black rags tied around her head like an elaborate turban and her middle as if holding her together, began to walk away, as if conversational obligations had been fulfilled, and I followed. We left her staring after us.

  “There was a nosy functionary in the embassy I didn’t like, and I always tried to duck when I saw him coming. A petty intruder, I think he got wind of my courier route or suspected I wasn’t burning the trash the way I was supposed to. He was always sniffing around where he wasn’t wanted, and he was difficult to get rid of. Once I walked backward in a circular hall in order to avoid detection, only to run into him backward. Slam!”

  “Who’s Henry?” I asked again. I wasn’t really interested in Auguste’s ghostly lover, but was surprised she hadn’t ever mentioned him before, spilling over with memories of a love that embraced her even in fantasy, a love in which she was more than just a messenger.

  “Henry was the man I met in the evening after work in order to hand over the cônes.” Only once before had she alluded to the identity of her contact by saying that the Army General Staff had more important fish to fry than love letters and she, Auguste, was more than a common go-between.

  “First I have to tell you about poor Martin Brucker, an agent for the Second Bureau, I used to leave my cônes for him. Some people say the lower you go in the rungs of spying, the more lowlifes you meet, but there are lowlifes everywhere, and Brucker wasn’t necessarily one of these. I knew his uncle, a retired pensioner. We lived in the same building. Brucker’s three faults were that he liked money, he was indiscreet, and he had a girlfriend, Millescamp, who was up to no good. She was gap-toothed and like to wear a plaid dress that fit her to a T. His uncle told me she slept late, making a living by selling ecclesiastical souvenirs at Notre Dame. She had great pretensions and no alliances to anyone except herself. Millescamp accused Brucker of wanting only money, of not paying serious attention to her, although she wasn’t very different. She told everyone he wasn’t much of an agent, only a salesman who would sell my papers to whoever offered the right price, and soon Brucker, the middleman of sorts, was finished thanks to his big-mouth girlfriend. I do my job for my country, not for the money. A down-and-out Englishman I met during the trial said of Millescamp that she really was a thousand scamps. She was a piece of work. She stole documents from Brucker when he was asleep and sold them to the Germans. You can imagine this little man waking up in a dark room, alone, looking around and figuring out that the woman he loves is gone with my garbage, my cônes, his meal ticket. When he visited his uncle he stormed up and down the stairs talking to himself, growing passionate in his distress. He would have her put in jail, and toward this end he didn’t have to do much, and Martin, once roused, was spiteful enough to send a letter here or pay a call there. She was easily caught and sent to prison, but it didn’t matter. Martin Brucker still had a reputation for a big mouth, no more spying for him. After his girlfriend’s deceit was uncovered, I met only with Henry, a much more important man, and left my cônes for him in church. If it hadn’t been for Millescamp in her loud plaids, Brucker and I could have gone on for years. He was my kind of man, and I was fond of him, but it wasn’t to be. Meeting Henry in church at night I felt kicked upstairs, I think it’s called. Commandant Henry was formidable and uncommunicative, a lump of black ice sitting in a church pew. An important man, I know, but I couldn’t quite figure him out.

  “Commandant Henry of the General Staff, head shaved almost to the skull, thick moustache with waxed ends,” she whispered, and beginning with the words General Staff of the French Army, the story my mother and the other tenants only had the vaguest grasp of was explained.

  I understood about half of what she was saying, but I had no idea how my mother was going to spin all this nattering about tight plaid suits and a treacherous gap-tooth smile into gold. Auguste winked at me when she said the name Brucker, and I wondered what had gone on between them. It was clear she didn’t like Brucker’s girlfriend, but was she also a bit jealous of her?

  “My cônes were crucial. I was trusted and never caught. Henry wouldn’t tolerate any jokes. An important person, he wouldn’t have given Brucker the time of day, nor me either, but he needed me. I could give him what he required.”

  Auguste paused and winked again. I couldn’t imagine her as a young woman. She seemed like someone who had always been old. The man, Henry, probably used her in some way she would never recognize.

  “I respected Henry, but he made me nervous. I preferred to leave my papers hidden in the church behind a relic or a statue; he could pick them up without ever actually seeing yours truly,” she pointed to herself.

  “Brucker, in disgrace, was desperate to return to the bureau. He haunted 78, rue de Lille, and once I gave him a letter I stole directly from Schwarzkoppen’s pigeonhole. He opened it right in the embassy and ran off, saying it was important, critical. He laughed. He would be a hero. What was in the letter? How should I know? I couldn’t read it. His uncle was a friend, I would do what I could for him, to help him get his job back. When the bordereau surfaced it was full of secrets turned over by that scoundrel D, it was said. Some say that list of secrets was in the letter I handed Brucker, some say the bordereau came via the Ordinary Track. That was what my route was known as.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I have no idea. I couldn’t read the letter. Was it the one I gave him or did I deliver it myself? I don’t know. It might have been in the garbage. All kinds of things were.

  “A traffic in documents. Imagine, if you can, a parade of files, miles of files, marching from Pigalle to the Champs Elysees to Montparnasse, stopping at one office after another, each office or apartment adding more papers to the parade of documents. Many of them are forgeries, pastiches, collages rephotographed and passed off as original copies. Only my cônes directly from the embassy ga
rbage are genuine, and I deliver only to Henry.”

  “But it’s only papers that have been thrown away.”

  “No, you’re wrong. Junk is the best. People imagine trash is trash. No one looks a second time at that which has been tossed into paper hell. Those that do, like myself, are rewarded. Great secrets have been found in junk or written on torn pieces of paper. Schwarzkoppen, the military attaché, an attractive and important man, tore his letters into two to twenty fragments. Occasionally you would get a ball, a crumpled wedge of onionskin or blue paper. These smooth out with no trouble. When Henry went home to his wife, I imagine they reconstructed letters and sorted them into piles by candlelight; fragments spread out on a table, on the floor, dinner pushed aside, growing cold.”

  She stopped in the middle of the street and laughed out loud. I didn’t know what to make of her stories.

  “Schwarzkoppen, Tête Noire, he was called, what a name.”

  A woman in a red hat stared at her, pulled a black tulle veil over her nose; I nudged Auguste forward, then tried to wipe my hand on my dress. She really smelled.

  “I earned 250 francs a week. It was the best job I ever had. My route was the most reliable in French intelligence, and it was called only this: the ordinary track. That’s all. Every cigar on the General Staff knew me as the ordinary track. You could ask them even now, except Henry is dead.” She stopped speaking. We began to walk again, and she gripped my arm harder.

  I’ve begun to put the American’s things into boxes. His books and papers written in English are as meaningless to me as the cônes were to Auguste. It all looks like nonsense. The Shirelles, Litle Anthony and the Imperials, The Chiffons, The Marvelettes. Looks French but isn’t. Every time I clean this room out, I imagine her inventory of bills, receipts, love letters between men and women, between women, between military attachés, cigarette papers, fruit wrappers, and important documents. I’ve even searched this room for bits of things she may have left behind, but it’s been empty, cleaned, and reoccupied thirty or forty times since she lived here. She never saved any of her original cônes anyway. They had been taken away from her. That had been the beginning of the Dreyfus affair.

  “Schwarzkoppen, the German attaché, was elegant but careless. His trash bins were open catalogs, schedules of entire days, weeks from the most personal to the most secret. It came out at the trial.”

  Bits of paper tumbled into her bags soundlessly, innocently, in slow motion. She polished an iron grill, she hummed to herself, and sat at a black Dresden piano as calmly as a bank robber in the middle of the night with the alarms disconnected, taking a break for a smoke. I imagined her listening at doors, waiting until everyone had left, before she could depart with her bulky bags, out the service entrance into the night. The elegant and attractive men and women were like movie images. If she put her hand to the screen, she’d feel only canvas; none would shake her hand in return. They lived in the world of written language. Their exchange lay in a milieu of signs that she, though blind to them, had the ability to completely undermine, but the spy in the house of love and intrigue was eventually reduced to living off scraps thrown out the back doors of restaurants. She might have seen one of Schwarzkoppen’s lovers dining inside, waving forks, elbowing waiters, knocking over glasses. The contents of the fragments she so conscientiously collected were to Auguste entirely imaginary. What did she think they referred to? Poison gas? A bomb capable of leveling a city? She couldn’t even sign her name just for fun across illicitly acquired notes on French artillery secrets.

  1. A note on the hydraulic brake of the 120

  2. A note covering troops

  3. Modification of artillery formations

  4. Madagascar

  5. The sketch for a firing manual for country artillery

  I am off to maneuvers.

  Yours,

  Auguste

  She was like a blind fisherman who caught both rare fish and rubber boots in her net but relied on the boats of other men to get out to sea in the first place. The ultimate word-democrat, she rejected nothing.

  We went into a shop that sold secondhand china. Auguste needed a cup and saucer, a bowl, and a plate. She had decided to stay in our building awhile, and my mother said I might take her to a cheap place where she could buy a few things. Lazare’s was dark and dusty. There wasn’t much in the shop. Auguste picked through crates of crockery. In the dark only a few rays of light hit the rim of a plate or glass. An old man with reddish hair and a long beard slept behind the counter. A younger one came out and told Auguste to leave. She wouldn’t be served in his shop. She could buy nothing here. He said that he recognized her and knew her name. I turned red when he looked at me, as if I was guilty too, without knowing what the crime might have been. Why did these strangers hate her so much? What had the Ordinary Track done? Auguste began to sweat and shuffled toward the door. She would have been thrown out into the street if we’d stayed, I’m sure of it. I followed her to the door feeling as if I’d been caught stealing, but I had no idea why. What would my mother say? How could I tell her what had just transpired when I didn’t really know myself?

  “During the trial it came out, what I’d done, and so I lost my job. Everyone knew about the Ordinary Track. I served my country, but I lost my job, and it was Dreyfus’s fault. I didn’t care if he was guilty or innocent. I told everyone. I didn’t care who knew. The papers I brought in proved his guilt. I was glad of it, and knew they had the right man. Citizens like Lazare might say evidence of his innocence was discovered in forgeries created from my papers, but I don’t believe it. He was a traitor. I may be the only one who thinks it was that simple, but I do believe they should have left him on Devil’s Island. People have called me a liar, a double agent, but I was none of these. How could I lie? Garbage never lies. I don’t even know what a double agent might be.

  “Papers like snow, eddying in drifts. Each paper flake is unique and laced with blue veins, inky writing. That’s what gets you into trouble; so I feel innocent when I examine each bit of illegibility. A corner here, a crooked line there. My ignorance preserved my innocence. I sniff things out, rely on instinct, not wayward thoughts, so I’m always right. I have a nose, an instinct,” she tapped it and pinched the flange of nostrils as if holding her breath until the end of her nose turned very white.

  “In church I think about the hell in the pictures. There must be chars to keep things up, to stoke the fires.”

  “I thought her family might have found her by now.”

  “She has no family.”

  “Madame Gilberte went to the police.”

  “She did?”

  “They weren’t interested. Nobody cares about the Ordinary Track.”

  “I can’t have her living here rent free.”

  “Nobody paid for the room before. The owners will never know.”

  “I was stupid. She’s a lump, nothing more.”

  “I don’t know if she was really just a lump,” I said to my mother as she sorted bills. “She had to act stupid. Perhaps that’s why she was never caught. We could go to the papers, tell them we’ve discovered a national heroine who deserves a reward, or better treatment at least.”

  “They won’t care either.”

  “How do you know?”

  “When I first saw her I thought she might be like one of those cases of a celebrity suffering from amnesia; you know, and when they wake up, so to speak, gratitude is showered on whoever rescued them. Now I’m not sure that she wasn’t just a minor player who found the spotlight trained on her one day and lost whatever footing she had. I can’t remember what it was she retrieved from the embassy.”

  I told her what I knew. My mother’s impulses were doomed to disappoint her. Her get-rich-quick schemes, founded on charity, never worked. Some people bet on horses or bought lottery tickets. My mother bet on strangers, from confidence men to women found living on the street. She sat by the keys, looking into the dustbin. It was full of papers.

  “Some
citizens will say anything and expect to be believed. You will find as you grow older that they turn out to have a history of it,” she said.

  “I believe her.”

  “I remember Henry created forgeries pasting together a piece here and a piece there. Auguste must have believed in the army and in the Syndicate. She went crazy, became an enthusiastic symbol for La Libre Parole, and for its editor, Edgar Drumont, for those who wanted all foreigners put in boats and blown up, I think. We’ll have to ask her what she did.”

  “There’s no point. She doesn’t know herself.”

  “She’s not much of a treasure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean? That’s the end of the Ordinary Track, then. I can’t keep freeloaders here.”

  She went out into the courtyard to speak to Mademoiselle J., who had come downstairs partly undressed in order to complain about Gilberte’s yammering little dog. I was fascinated by her transparent underwear, which showed under her robes. My mother thought there was no point in wearing anything if you could see through it, but the filmy things were curiosities to me. I sorted the mail slowly, and then, since the shops were about to close I went out to buy wine for dinner. When I came back, although she couldn’t have left that quickly, it seemed to me that Auguste was already gone.

  La Fontaine was full of stories that demonstrated that kindness might not always be its own reward, and strangers were not always benevolent godmothers in disguise. Tricksterism demanded constant vigilance. Behind what appeared to be honest offers lurked one hoax after another, and every possible opportunity to do good had to be examined. There was no way to know which indigent strangers were masked princes and which were devils. The charlady hadn’t promised us riches. That had been my mother’s construction, but she didn’t blame herself. There were, she said, too many hungry mouths in the world to feel badly for too long about any single one of them. I put my arms around her, but she was distant, and so I left her alone. She swept up in the morning, knocking over an oil lamp brought over from Algiers. The metal was already very dented, no genie came out or was evicted by this last battering, but when my mother saw the damage she had done she sat very still with it in her lap and wouldn’t speak to me. I went to her post and took keys from the tenants who left them with us in the morning.